Speakers
Description
Testing of network devices is mostly based on quite unrealistic synthetic network traffic. For devices such as monitoring probes, however, this unrealistic traffic mix does not reflect the nature and dynamic behaviour of real networks, like the distribution of short and long flows, various protocols and services. Therefore, the CESNET research team has designed a method for anonymised profiling of real high-speed (backbone) networks that preserves key traffic characteristics. Based on these profiles, the method generates realistic test traffic and replays it repeatedly in a testbed. Using a commodity 100 Gbps FPGA NIC, we show how we achieve high-speed and highly accurate replay of the generated traffic, with transmission driven by timestamps directly at the firmware level and with accuracy in the low nanosecond range. Our solution can also be used for precise replay of a regular PCAP file.
