Network chatter generator

Sun Feb 25 18:42:42 UTC 2024

On 2024-02-23 17:33, Brandon Martin wrote:
> Before I go to the trouble of making one myself, does anybody happen to
> know of a pre-canned program to generate realistic and scalable amounts
> of broadcast/broad-multicast network background "chatter" seen on
> typical consumer and business networks?

You may want to check out TRex:  https://trex-tgn.cisco.com

It's free and uses the DPDK framework, so even a 5-year-old Xeon box should be able to saturate 10g (14Mpps) which is usually enough to make most small things fall over.

IIRC, it uses PCAP files as a template for traffic generation, and replaces the header info (src/dst) with values you configure.  So, if you have some captures with the background chatter you want, you can probably turn around and use those for testing.  The tool includes some console programs that show throughput, drops, etc.  You can scale the generation to any level you want (it just loops over the captures).  You can also turn on multiple generators (each with its own capture) to simulate a mix of traffic at different sizes and rates.  The distribution comes with several canned captures (imix, dns, large packets, small packets, etc).

The one thing I haven't tried with it is multicast, so that might need some extra work.  Maybe you can specify a multicast MAC at L2 for the generated packets (normally you set this to the MAC of the DUT)?

Jason