Classification of UTGen synthetic traffic generator

Abstract

Today, the main challenges in front of suppliers of networking hardware and software are to test their product under heavy traffic load. Such investigation is usually carried out in the laboratory where the prodigious amount of traffic is required. So one question emerges here is that from where to bring this tremendous traffic. Networking research community suggests a synthetic traffic generator as a solution that would allow evaluation of the performance of the system under test with a large set of network protocols running on different types of hardware and can be customized to their specific needs. Depending upon the needs, traffic generators can be classified as hardware-based traffic generators or software based traffic generators. Here it is recommended to use software based traffic generators as traffic generators in this category usually are open source tools that depend only on networking stack of the operating system to send and receive packets. Hence, it is possible to transmit a huge amount of packets free of cost generating the synthetic traffic in the network which can capture the behavior of real traffic in the network. Here our aim is to present classification of the traffic generators so that it could help network researchers to use appropriate traffic generator to evaluate the performance of system efficiently. This paper also presents a development of software-based high speed, scalable UTGen traffic generator which can generate UDP and TCP traffic and hence the named as UTGen.