BRUNO: A High Performance Traffic Generator for Network Processor

The current software tools for traffic generation suffer from poor performance in terms of frames per second and timing/rate accuracy, because of the intrinsic limitations of the PC architecture. This paper proposes a different approach, based on a cooperative PC/NP architecture: an advanced software tool runs on a host PC and instructs the processing engines of an Intel IXP2400 network processor, which take care of the actual traffic generation. This way, we keep the high flexibility of PC solutions while outperforming them in terms of packet rate. In addition, a time correction mechanism is introduced, in order to improve the system precision in traffic models reproduction. The adoption of such a mechanism is justified through statistical analysis of the overall system: the experiments carried out prove the effectiveness of this approach in reducing the mean interdeparture time error. Moreover, they show the capability of BRUNO in generating 1.5 Mpps with high accuracy.