PIPO-TG: Parameterizable High-Performance Traffic Generation
Filipo G. Costa, Francisco Germano Vogt, Fabricio Rodríguez Cesen, Ariel Góes De Castro, Marcelo Caggiani Luizelli, Christian Esteve Rothenberg
Abstract
In recent years, the increasing demand for network resources due to real-time applications and data-intensive activities has posed challenges in managing and optimizing network performance. To assess network performance, security, and efficiency, traffic generation plays a crucial role. We introduce PIPO-TG, a Tofino-based traffic generation for high-performance experiments. The primary objective of PIPO-TG is to generate realistic and diverse traffic patterns, enabling researchers to evaluate network performance under varying conditions providing customizable packet forwarding with P4 programmable data planes. Our main contributions include user-defined packet header customization and open-source code for reproducibility. These efforts foster collaboration within the research community to advance traffic generation techniques. We show that PIPO-TG only requires a few lines of code to simulate heterogeneous network scenarios (e.g., traffic bursts and DDoS attacks) while maintaining hardware performance and flexibility.