Swing: Realistic and Responsive Network Traffic Generation

This paper presents Swing, a closed-loop, network-responsive traffic generator that accurately captures the packet interactions of a range of applications using a simple structural model. Starting from observed traffic at a single point in the network, Swing automatically extracts distributions for user, application, and network behavior. It then generates live traffic corresponding to the underlying models in a network emulation environment running commodity network protocol stacks. The authors find that the generated traffic is statistically similar to the original traffic. Further, to the best of the knowledge, they are the first to reproduce burstiness in traffic across a range of timescales using a model applicable to a variety of network settings.