Recommendations for dynamic imix traffic generators

Thu Aug 15 16:46:07 UTC 2013

Hi folks,

I'm trying to put together a test bench to soak some CPE equipment with an imix of eyeball traffic.  I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations on open-source platforms that might be able to accomplish this.

I'd like to simulate traffic conditions that various tiers of Internet users might create from behind these CPEs - Casual user, business user, gamer, heavy users, netflix client, Apple TV client, a combination of any of the aforementioned, etc.

In a perfect world, I'd love for these traffic patterns to be dynamic; various pps/bps/fps/nat cps rates, various intervals of each and durations of each instead of just continually puking out the same set of packets in an endless loop.

I think it would be important for this traffic generator to be intelligent enough to determine whether or not the tests it's performing are successful or not; that is, be cognizant of errors in the tests that would translate into what a user would perceive to be a broken web page or a slow loading web page or a video freezing or a game to lock up, all of which might be attributed to a timeout on a DNS lookup or packet-loss or a bad NAT stack, etc.

If anyone has any ideas or experiences they can share on this type of setup, I'd love some feedback or advice.

icir.org has a list of tools which I'm making my way through as well.  Not sure what is useful for what it I'm trying to do, but I digress.

Thanks in advance.