Survey of synthetic traffic generators

Synthetic Traffic generation plays a vital role in research related to computer networking. Most of the efforts taken so far by several researchers in the network community are relied on the synthetic traffic generation. Therefore to generate the synthetic traffic; traffic generators are used. Further this synthetic traffic behaves like real traffic and can be used to capture the behavior the network or device under test. Hence based on the design and features most of the researchers classify traffic generators into several categories. This contribution goes towards the classification of traffic generators so that it should help practitioners to use appropriate tools in their experimental works.