Georgios Papadopoulos: Assessment of Traffic Generators

There exist plenty of packet generators aimed at measuring the performance of computer networks. Hence, the selection of the proper tool becomes a hard task, and evaluating which one fulfills best the prospect task is very time-consuming. In this work we assess the performance of four representative (and most popular) network packet generators in a laboratory environment in dierent conditions and under a wide set of experiments. The focus of this work falls on the evaluation of their behavior when using wireless links (i.e., Ethernet 100 Mbps & IEEE 802.11a) and the results demonstrate that the different  nature of the analyzed tools provide different performance under different conditions. Thus, the main goal of this work is to provide researchers and IT administrators with an important set of performance results under real-life constraints.