Antoine Varet

Realistic Network Traffic Profile Generation: Theory and Practice

Network engineers and designers need additional tools to generate network traffic in order to test and evaluate application performances or network provisioning for instance. In such a context, traffic characteristics are the very 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 in 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, how we implemented it and which methodology it follows to produce traffic with realistic characteristics. To do so, we chose to consider different stochastic processes in order to model the complexity of the different original traffics we wanted to replay. In our approach, we are able to consider several statistical laws and to combine their effects to model accurately the original behavior we analyzed in the real data. We then select the right parameters to consider as inputs for our SourcesOnOff tool. This approach gives really good traffic characteristics and, consequently, the generated traffic is really closed to reality as results presented at this end of this paper demonstrate it.