The community's ability to monitor traffic on advanced optical and high performance networks has not kept up with the raw development and deployment of fiber and switching capability at those bandwidths. WDM networks, OC48 and OC192 networks are gaining momentum, but the current state of measurement technologies handicaps engineers who manage these networks from trying to monitor traffic on such links. This initiative draws upon state of the art developments in computer processing and data storage to develop tools capable of constant monitoring of traffic (not sampled) at OC48 speeds for research and engineering purposes. Coral Monitors are used to collect information about the amount of traffic (in bytes, packets or flows) traversing a link, as well as traffic characteristics such as which applications and transport protocols generate the most traffic, which packet sizes are most common, how many packets of various sizes tend to arrive in clusters, and matrices of traffic flows among individual networks and autonomous systems. CAIDA and the University of Waikato are designing a capture card with an innovative architecture comprised of Vitesse's ATM and POS OC48 chipsets and a Xilinx Virtex chipset with data transfer rates of more than 400 Mbytes/second. The resulting DAG 4.1 capture card permits capture of every packet in both directions on a full 2.4 GB OC48 speed link. An additional part of the Coral project is the development of an array of software tools to enable post-analysis of Coral trace files for a variety of traffic characterization tasks. This library includes utilities for flow analysis, Autonomous System matrices, composition of traffic by application or other category, and various modules for investigating specific phenomena such as DNS characteristics and denial-of-service attacks.

For more information about current status and progress of the OC48mon project, please look at the following sites:
The University of Waikato DAG4 Architecture Page
The University of Waikato History of the DAG Project Page
The CAIDA CoralReef Software Development Page
CAIDA's quarterly progress reports to DARPA/SPAWAR