A Distributed Traffic Replay Framework for Network Emulation

Abstract

Traffic replay can effectively improve the fidelity of network emulation and can support emerging network verification and network security evaluation. A distributed traffic replay framework for network emulation, named DTRF, is designed for large-scale and high-fidelity network traffic emulation on the cloud platform. A fast traffic replay strategy bypassing the kernel is proposed to improve the traffic replay performance in the single node by alleviating the problem of high overhead from the kernel protocol stack. To conveniently expand the emulation scale, an extendable method of workflow orchestration that can realize the flexible control and configuration of the execution process of emulation tasks is proposed. The experimental results show that, compared with that of the traditional method, the throughput of traffic replay is increased by 3.71 times on average, the number of concurrent streams is increased by 4.18 times on average, and the timestamp error of the replayed packets is reduced by 97.8% on average. The DTRF can expand the emulation scenario to a massive heterogeneous network.