When considering to passively collect and then process network traffic traces, the need to analyze raw data at several Gbps and to extract higher level indexes from the stream of packets poses typical BigData-like challenges. In this paper, we engineer a methodology to extract, collect and process passive traffic traces. In particular, we design and implement analytics that, based on a filtering process and on the building of empirical distributions, enable the comparison between two generic collections, e.g., data gathered from two different vantage points, from different populations, or at different times. The ultimate goal is to highlight statistically significant differences that could be useful to flag to incidents for the network manager.

After introducing the methodology, we apply it to assess the impact of Carrier-Grade NAT (CGN), a technology that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) deploy to limit the usage of expensive public IP addresses. Since CGN may introduce connectivity issues and performance degradation, we process a large dataset of passive measurements collected from an ISP using CGN for part of its customers. We first extract detailed per-flow information by processing packets from live links. Then, we derive higher level statistics that are significant for the end-users, e.g., TCP connection setup time, HTTP response time, or BitTorrent average download throughput. At last, we contrast figures of customers being offered public or private addresses, and look for statistically significant differences. Results show that CGN does not impair quality of service in the analyzed ISP deployment. In addition, we use the collected data to derive useful figures for the proper dimensioning of the CGN and the configuration of its parameters in order to avoid impairments on end-users’ experience.