BRUTE: A High Performance and Extensibile Traffic Generator

Evaluating the performance of high speed networks is a critical task due to the lack of reliable tools to generate traffic workloads at high rates and to the inaccessibility of network equipments. To address the problem of reliable device testing, we developed an extensible traffic generator, called BRUTE (Browny and RobUst Traffic Engine), running on top of Linux operating system. BRUTE takes advantage of the Linux kernel potential in order to accurately generate traffic flows up to very high bitrates. This software is an extensible framework that provides a number of optimized functions that easily allow the implementation of ad hoc modules for customized traffic patterns generation. A number of library modules implementing common traffic profiles (like CBR, Poisson process and Poissonian Arrival of Burst process) are already implemented and integrated into the package. Performance of BRUTE has been compared to the one of several widespread traffic generators over Fast-Ethernet and Gigabit-Ethernet networks. The results of our tests show the superior performance of BRUTE in terms of both the achieved throughput and the level of bitrate precision, under all possible values of the frame length