An efficient ATM traffic generator for the real-time production of a large class of complex traffic profiles

This paper presents an advanced architecture for a traffic generator capable of producing ATM traffic streams according to fully general semi-Markovian stochastic models. The architecture employs a basic traffic generator platform and enhances it by adding facilities for “driving” the cell generation process through high-level specifications. Several kinds of optimization are employed for enhancing the software's speed to match the hardware's potential and for ensuring that traffic streams corresponding to models with a wide range of parameters can be generated efficiently and reliably. The proposed traffic generation procedure is highly modular. Thus, although this paper deals with ATM traffic, the main elements of the architecture can be used equally well for generating traffic loads on other networking technologies, IP-based networks being a notable example.