Analysis and Experimentation of Internet Traffic Generator (original) (raw)

Realistic and responsive network traffic generation

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2006

This paper presents Swing, a closed-loop, network-responsive traffic generator that accurately captures the packet interactions of a range of applications using a simple structural model. Starting from observed traffic at a single point in the network, Swing automatically extracts distributions for user, application, and network behavior. It then generates live traffic corresponding to the underlying models in a network emulation environment running commodity network protocol stacks. We find that the generated traces are statistically similar to the original traces. Further, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to reproduce burstiness in traffic across a range of timescales using a model applicable to a variety of network settings. An initial sensitivity analysis reveals the importance of capturing and recreating user, application, and network characteristics to accurately reproduce such burstiness. Finally, we explore Swing's ability to vary user characteristics, appl...

Performance evaluation of an open distributed platform for realistic traffic generation

Performance Evaluation, 2005

Network researchers have dedicated a notable part of their efforts to the area of modeling traffic and to the implementation of efficient traffic generators. We feel that there is a strong demand for traffic generators capable to reproduce realistic traffic patterns according to theoretical models and at the same time with high performance. This work presents an open distributed platform for traffic generation that we called distributed internet traffic generator (D-ITG), capable of producing traffic (network, transport and application layer) at packet level and of accurately replicating appropriate stochastic processes for both inter departure time (IDT) and packet size (PS) random variables. We implemented two different versions of our distributed generator. In the first one, a log server is in charge of recording the information transmitted by senders and receivers and these communications are based either on TCP or UDP. In the other one, senders and receivers make use of the MPI library. In this work a complete performance comparison among the centralized version and the two distributed versions of D-ITG is presented.

High Performance Internet Traffic Generators

The Journal of …, 2006

In the networking field, traffic generator platforms are of a paramount importance. This paper deals with the description of a distributed software platform for synthetic traffic generation over IPv4/v6 networks, called D-ITG (Distributed Internet Traffic Generator). We point our attention on the original architectural choices and evaluate the performance achieved by the platform. D-ITG supports several protocols and many traffic patterns. We tested our generation platform over different scenarios and compared it to many of the currently available, and most widely adopted, traffic generators. We found that D-ITG offers enhanced functionalities and improved performance.

Modeling and generating TCP application workloads

2007 Fourth International Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks and Systems (BROADNETS '07), 2007

In order to perform valid experiments, traffic generators used in network simulators and testbeds require contemporary models of traffic as it exists on real network links. Ideally one would like a model of the workload created by the full range of applications running on the Internet today. Unfortunately, at best, all that is available to the research community are a small number of models for single applications or application classes such as the web or peer-to-peer. We present a method for creating a model of the full TCP application workload that generates the traffic flowing on a network link. From this model, synthetic workload traffic can be generated in a simulation that is statistically similar to the traffic observed on the real link. The model is generated automatically using only a simple packet-header trace and requires no knowledge of the actual identity or mix of TCP applications on the network. We present the modeling method and a traffic generator that will enable researchers to conduct network experiments with realistic, easy-to-update TCP application workloads. An extensive validation study is performed using Abilene and university traces. The method is validated by comparing traces of synthetically generated traffic to the original traces for a set of important measures of realism. We also show how workload models can be re-sampled to generate statistically valid randomized and rescaled variations.

Snapshot simulation of internet traffic: fast and accurate for heavy-tailed flows

Proceedings of the 1st international conference on …, 2008

Simulations involving processes at very different time scales can be so slow to converge that starting in one state and waiting for a representative sample of the state space to be explored is not feasible. Under these circumstances we need to find a different way to explore a representative range of states in order to obtain valid results in a reasonable time. Internet traffic is an example of this situation. This is due to the fact that it is made up of clearly identifiable flows and a significant proportion of overall bytes occur in long-lived flows, whose overall duration will in many cases be longer than can be simulated. In this paper we develop a method which constructs a "randomly selected state" of Internet traffic from scratchsnapshot simulation. The technique is applied to a realistic model of Internet traffic and is used to confirm theoretical results for the number of active flows in a router which adopts either Fair Queueing or Shortest Job First as its queueing discipline. Snapshot simulations are also compared to conventional simulations of the same systems and it is shown that although convergence to the same results appears to be occurring, satisfactory accuracy cannot be obtained in a reasonable time by the conventional simulations. Simulation of a practical high-performance queue discipline, SJF-n, in which only the largest n flows at any time are de-prioritized, is also simulated and shown to give good performance for quite low n.

Swing: Realistic and Responsive Network Traffic Generation

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 2009

This paper presents Swing, a closed-loop, networkresponsive traffic generator that accurately captures the packet interactions of a range of applications using a simple structural model. Starting from observed traffic at a single point in the network, Swing automatically extracts distributions for user, application, and network behavior. It then generates live traffic corresponding to the underlying models in a network emulation environment running commodity network protocol stacks. We find that the generated traffic is statistically similar to the original traffic. Further, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to reproduce burstiness in traffic across a range of timescales using a model applicable to a variety of network settings. An initial sensitivity analysis reveals the importance of our individual model parameters to accurately reproduce such burstiness. Finally, we explore Swing's ability to vary user characteristics, application properties, and wide-area network conditions to project traffic characteristics into alternate scenarios.

Synthesizing of Markovian and Self-similar LAN/WAN Traffic on Data Networks

Anais do 2002 International Telecommunications Symposium, 2002

Lately, the actual statistical behavior of LAN/WAN traf c is being confronted against classical Markovian-based models. Many theoretical and simulation work have been done to date. Almost all such disagreements are based on software simulations. In this article we show a simple yet reliable tool that can emulate in an ef cient manner many LAN/WAN traf c workloads. Spanning from Markovian-type traf c to fractal models. With this tool you can reproduce the statistical behavior you want your IP traf c ows would have over a real network environment. It can reproduce either real aggregated traf c (previously measured traces) or simply one workstation traf c behavior. This is a UDP-based tool, averting the complex TCP ow control mechanism (this was done so just for practical purposes only), nevertheless TCP ows can be reproduced though. All tests using this tool were supported with well-funded statistical analysis methods and was veri ed that statistical properties, overall concerning the Hurst (H) parameter, from such theoretical traces was maintained successfully, i.e., H real → H theo. All these features make this tool very reliable to work with.

Parallel Internet Traffic Simulator with Self-Similar Scale-Free Network Models

2008

The paper presents a platform, named Parallel Internet Traffic Simulator (PITS), which allows simulating Internet traffic and accurately replicating appropriate stochastic processes using scale-free models with self-similar topology. The experiments compare simulation of large-size scale-free networks when using different number of CPU's running in parallel in the platform cluster and note the differences in simulation time as well as some characteristics related to the efficiency of the simulation distribution is possible and if there are limitations in single-CPU simulation. We consider that PITS shows interesting properties when compared to other traffic generators and therefore it represents a real simulation tool for controlled traffic generation over real networks which allows to accurately analyze and evaluate the performance of network, transport, and application-level protocols.