High-Performance Traffic Workload Architecture for Testing DPI Systems

Traffic identification and classification are essential tasks performed by Internet Service Provider (ISPs) administrators. Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is currently playing a key role in traffic identification and classification due to its increased expressive power. To allow fair comparison among different DPI techniques and systems, workload generators should have the following characteristics: (i) synthetic packets with meaningful payloads; (ii) TCP and UDP traffic generation; (iii) a configurable network traffic profile, and (iv) a high-speed sending rate. This paper proposes a workload generator framework which inherits all of the above characteristics. A performance evaluation shows that our flexible workload generator system achieves very high sending rates over a 10Gbps network, using a commodity Linux machine. Additionally, we have configured and tested our workload generator following a real application traffic profile. We then analyzed its results within a DPI system, proving its accuracy and efficiency.