Flow-level traffic matrix generation for various data center networks

Abstract

The number of data centers deployed by governments, enterprises, and universities has been increased affected by the development of cloud computing technologies to reduce CAPAX and OPEX. Many architectures or topologies for data center networks have been proposed to address the diverse purposes and requirements. However, the construction of data centers incurs significant costs. Moreover, there are many technologies that can affect the structure of the data center. Before building a data center, it must be confirmed that it possesses the characteristics necessary to satisfy requirements. Efficient ways to find and confirm network characteristics include simulation and tests using a traffic generation method. Our proposed method is designed to generate network traffic that address many characteristics of data center networks explored by several studies. The proposed method generates network traffic utilizing flow-level traffic matrix, not directly generates packets. We used Python programming language to create traffic matrix and iPerf to generate network packets. To evaluate it, we compared the generation results to real network traffic collected from a data center network. The result shows that the generated traffic is similar with the real network traffic.