Network Testing Using a Novel Framework for Traffic Modeling and Generation*

Abstract

Network traffic modeling plays an important role in the generation of realistic network traffic in test environments. Especially in cases where researchers carry out experiments with real production-like traffic, as seen in specific home, enterprise, campus, LAN, or WAN networks. We present our ongoing work on a new framework that enables the methodical creation of application-agnostic traffic models from given network traces of a known network topology. The framework then uses these models to generate realistic traffic on a given network topology. We share a preliminary evaluation of the framework based on repeatable experiments where we model a typical web application traffic and then regenerate the traffic based on the model in a test network on our VTS (Virtual Topology Services) testbed.