DITGBox overview
DITGBox is available both as physical (based on COTS hardware) and virtual appliance to generate both stateful and stateless traffic flow sets based on a flexible approach supporting an extensible range of protocols and applications
RFC-COMPLIANT TESTS
NETWORK EQUIPMENT
STRESS TESTING
What is DITGBox?
DITGBox is a well suited and easy to use platform designed to stress network infrastructures by simulating real traffic at high bandwidth.
DITGBox is a high-speed platform for traffic generation and performance measurements over a wide range of protocols and applications.
The platform came to life as an answer to the limited flexibility of high-speed traffic generators and their high costs. DITGBox takes advantage of INTEL® DPDK software libraries to speed packet processing on COTS hardware up by 10 times. The appliance allows to configure and run experiments to measure network performance and possibly spot problems. It allows to test network robustness and equipment support of QoS/QoE to critical applications.
The product is based on a well known and widely used open source platform for traffic generation called Distributed Internet Traffic Generator (D-ITG), which has been founded by the Traffic research group of the University of Napoli “Federico II”, Italy. NM2 is a spin-off of such research group and represents the main contributor to the project.
Why use DITGBox?
- Easy testing of Quality of Service, Traffic Engineering, and Routing architectures, measurement of the performance of network architectures, devices, or applications in terms of throughput, jitter, losses and delay using different traffic patterns
- Generation of complex traffic mixes to unveil equipment performance and to monitor QoS of specific application flows
- Generation of realistic background traffic for testing new applications or network environments and understanding their behavior in a real context before going in production
KEY FEATURES
Powerful and flexible web GUI including:
- Detailed per-flow and aggregated statistics and QoS metrics
- Real-time reporting with tables and plots
- Flexible offline reports with drag-n-drop functionalities
- Easily configure complex network traffic mixes using both real PCAP traces and stochastic models
- Realistic reproduction of stateful end-to-end traffic from L3 to L7
High performance with commodity hardware:
- Up to 100 Gbit/s with a 1U server
Support for many RFC-compliant tests:
How does DITGBox work?
DITGBox unlocks the ability to stress test network infrastructures in a very effective and useful way. It can reproduce background network traffic based on stochastic models at a very high bandwidth. It can also "replay" captured traffic reaching spikes of 100 Gb/s per single appliance!
DITGBox (virtual) appliances can be deployed in different vantage points to enable the stress testing of the entire network infrastructure. For instance, each appliance can be configured to generate a complex set of flows towards several other boxes operating in end-to-end mode. This is extremely useful to understand the impact of a specific traffic mix on a complex network topology in advance or to reproduce a realistic background scenario when performing other network activities.
A single DITGBox appliance can be also used in closed-loop mode to stress test network appliances with high accuracy.
DITGBox is composed of three main modules:
- Traffic Generation Module – Embeds a C/C++ engine based on D-ITG responsible for crafting packets at L3/4, statistically controlling their inter-time and size, and optionally configuring L7 payload content based on raw files or pre-captured PCAP traces. It also accurately measures the performance of aggregated traffic (e.g. latency and jitter through a device under test) and/or the detailed performance experienced by each generated flow. The Generator module can also perform mostly used RFCs , Request For Comment, experiments to certify the compliance of a particular network appliance.
- RESTful API Module – Provides an easy-to-use RESTful API for programmatically controlling the appliance. This is extremely useful to integrate the appliance with existing solutions so to orchestrate the traffic generation and the collection of pre-processed results. The API also enables maintaining the product (e.g., remote upgrade, reboot, shutdown).
End-to-end: 2 BOXes
Closed loop: 1 BOX
- File Manager Module – Enables the management of the different file types supported by the appliance:
- Presets: saved traffic mix profile made of per-port flow sets
- Results: collected per-flow metrics along with originating preset
- PCAP Traces: pre-captured real traffic profiles
- Payloads Content: raw payload content templates
- Packet Size and IDT Distributions: timeseries for deterministic configuration of per-flow packet profiles
