Hammer: A real-world end-to-end network traffic simulator

We present Hammer, a real-world, end-to-end network traffic simulator, capable of simulating complex and dynamic network, user and server behaviors. The focus of this tool is to primarily facilitate investigations related to product stability, for instance different aspects of capacity, longevity, memory leaks, cores and also handle customer content testing that will reveal the behavior of the device under test in realistic network conditions. Hammer has a modular design which offers excellent scalability, rendering the platform capable of being installed on commodity hardware. In addition, Hammer has a resource-savvy nature, thus requires limited computational resources to generate significant traffic loads. Instead of operating on a packet level, Hammer offers application-layer workload interaction along with inherent data plane acceleration, delivering brisk performance with unparalleled flexibility and ease of use. Our tests show that Hammers operation is linearly linked to the underlying hardware resources, however, even when the simulator is installed in a resource-bound environment, it can still deliver traffic loads that correspond to thousands of interconnected users each with real-world behavior per session.