Synthetic trace generation for the Internet

We consider the distribution of destination addresses in IP packets arriving at an Internet router and show that the spatial locality of those addresses is well characterized by an empirical power law function. We demonstrate how the LRU stack model implied by this function can be used to generate synthetic IP traffic, e.g., for experimental studies of routing and caching protocols. We also show how this model (which was originally devised to generate synthetic memory reference strings of programs) can be modified to better capture the temporal locality of destination addresses in aggregate IP traffic. Our observations are illustrated by comparing the footprints of real and synthetic traces, and by simulating routing table lookups driven by both types of traces.