The Need for Traffic Analysis

During the last years, the Internet has experienced a rapid growth. New multimedia applications demand for increased bandwidth. The World-Wide-Web with its intuitive interface has brought the Internet close to the masses and the number of users has therefore dramatically increased. Because of this, faster and faster backbone networks (like for example the vBNS) are being deployed. But not only the backbone network speed is rising. For multimedia applications, the traditional ethernet is more and more often replaced by network technologies like 100-base-T (also known as ``fast ethernet''), 100VG-AnyLan, ATM, FDDI etc. For traffic analysis, measurement and accounting on these high speed networks new applications are needed that can cope with the increased traffic.