A First Look at Accurate Network Traffic Generation in Virtual Environments

The generation of synthetic network traffic is necessary to several fundamental networking activities, ranging from device testing to path monitoring, with implications on security and management. While literature focused on high-rate traffic generation, for many use cases accurate traffic generation is of importance instead. These scenarios have expanded with Network Function Virtualization, Software Defined Networking, and Cloud applications, which introduce further causes for alterations of generated traffic. Such causes are described and experimentally evaluated in this work, where the generation accuracy of D-ITG, an open-source software generator, is investigated in a virtualized environment. A definition of accuracy in terms of Mean Absolute Percentage Error of the sequences of Payload Lengths (PLs) and Inter-Departure Times (IDTs) is exploited to this end. The tool is found accurate for all PLs and for IDTs greater than one millisecond, and after the correction of a systematic error, also from 100 us.