How to generate realistic network traffic ?

Antoine Varet (1) , Nicolas Larrieu (1)

1 TELECOM - ENAC - Equipe télécommunications

Network engineers and designers need additional tools to generate network traffic in order to test and evaluate, for instance, application performances or network provisioning. In such a context, traffic characteristics are the most important part of the work. Indeed, it is quite easy to generate traffic, but it is more difficult to produce traffic which can exhibit real characteristics such as the ones you can observe through the Internet. With the lack of adequate tools to generate data flows with "realistic behaviors" at the network or transport level, we needed to develop our tool entitled "SourcesOnOff". The emphasis of this article is on presenting this tool, explaining how we implemented it and outlining the methodology it follows to produce traffic with realistic characteristics.

Mots clés: traffic generation; network experimentation; network performance analysis; network measurement

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Antoine Varet, Nicolas Larrieu. How to generate realistic network traffic ?. IEEE COMPSAC 2014, 38th Annual International Computers, Software & Applications Conference, Jul 2014, Västerås, Sweden. pp xxxx. ⟨hal-00973913⟩