D-ITG: Distributed Internet Traffic Generator.

Approaches and systems for network workload generation are useful and effective only when they produce network traffic that is realistic and representative as much as possible of the real workload of the network scenario under study. Distributed Internet Traffic Generator (D-ITG) [1] is a platform capable to produce IPv4 and IPv6 traffic by accurately replicating the workload of current Internet applications. Two main alternative approaches exist in literature for the generation of such workload: (a) trace-based generation (TCPReplay, TCPivo, TCPopera, etc.), in which flows exactly replicate the content and the timings of traffic traces previously collected in real scenarios; (b) analytical model-based generation (TG, MGEN, RUDE/CRUDE, D-ITG, etc.), in which flow and packet generation processes are based on statistical models. With D-ITG, the generation can follow (i) simple stochastic models for packet size (PS) and inter departure time (IDT), (ii) more complex analytical models that mimic application-level protocol behavior, (iii) real traffic patterns captured in traffic traces.