Flexible high performance traffic generation on commodity multi-core platforms

Generating high-volume and accurate test traffic is crucial for assessing the performance of network devices in a reliable way and under different stress conditions. However, traffic generation still relies mostly on special purpose hardware. In fact, available software generators are able to reproduce rich and involved traffic patterns, but do not meet the performance requirements that are needed for effectively challenging the device under test. Nevertheless, hardware devices usually provide limited flexibility with respect to the traffic patterns that they can generate. The aim of this work is to design a traffic generator which can both achieve good performance and provide a flexible framework for supporting arbitrary traffic models. The key factor that enables our system to meet both requirements is parallelism, which is increasingly provided by modern commodity hardware: indeed our generator, which includes both kernel and user space components, can efficiently scale with multiple cores and multi-queue commodity network cards. By leveraging such a design, our generator is able to produce close-to-line-rate traffic on a 10Gbps link, while accommodating multiple traffic models and providing good accuracy.