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Realistic and responsive network traffic generation

Published: 11 August 2006 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents Swing, a closed-loop, network-responsive traffic generator that accurately captures the packet interactions of a range of applications using a simple structural model. Starting from observed traffic at a single point in the network, Swing automatically extracts distributions for user, application, and network behavior. It then generates live traffic corresponding to the underlying models in a network emulation environment running commodity network protocol stacks. We find that the generated traces are statistically similar to the original traces. Further, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to reproduce burstiness in traffic across a range of timescales using a model applicable to a variety of network settings. An initial sensitivity analysis reveals the importance of capturing and recreating user, application, and network characteristics to accurately reproduce such burstiness. Finally, we explore Swing's ability to vary user characteristics, application properties, and wide-area network conditions to project traffic characteristics into alternate scenarios.

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 36, Issue 4
Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
October 2006
445 pages
ISSN:0146-4833
DOI:10.1145/1151659
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCOMM '06: Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
    September 2006
    458 pages
    ISBN:1595933085
    DOI:10.1145/1159913
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 August 2006
Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 36, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. burstiness
  2. energy plot
  3. generator
  4. internet
  5. modeling
  6. structural model
  7. traffic
  8. wavelets

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