[Tmrg] Traffic Generators (Harpoon and Tmix)

[SANGTAE HA]

Hi all,

We have two compelling traffic generators, Tmix[1] and Harpoon[2], one
of them will be used as a common traffic generator for TCP testing.
Before deciding which traffic geneator we would go, I list up simple
comparisons between them. Feel free to update the table.

----------------------------------------------------------------
                  Tmix                 Harpoon
----------------------------------------------------------------
TCP/UDP   application-level    application-level
                 TCP                     TCP/UDP
----------------------------------------------------------------
Model        *(a,b,t) model     inter-arrival time and
                                         file size distributions
----------------------------------------------------------------
Trace         tcpdump            flow-tool (from routers)
                 *manual             *manual
----------------------------------------------------------------
Supported   Linux                Linux
                  FreeBSD          (FreeBSD)
                  NS2
----------------------------------------------------------------

*(a,b,t) = (request size, response size, user think time)
* "manual" means it supports user-generated vectors or distribution tables

Briefly, Tmix supports more platforms (NS2) while Harpoon includes an
additional UDP generation.
After reading the Tmix paper, it looks *(a,b,t) model can represent
user-interactions better than the model based on inter-arrival and
file size distributions.

Welcome your comments.

Sangtae

[1] M. Weigle, P. Adurthi, F. Hernandez-Campos, K. Jeffay and F. D.
Smith, Tmix: A Tool for Generating Realistic TCP Application Workloads
in ns-2, CCR, July 2006
[2] J. Sommers and P. Barford, Self-Configuring Network Traffic
Generation, IMC 2004.