How to validate traffic generators?

Abstract

Network traffic generators are widely used in networking research and they are validated by a very broad range of metrics (mainly traffic characteristics). In this paper we overview the state of the art of these metrics and unveil that there is no consensus in the research community how to validate these traffic generators and which metric to choose for validation purpose. This situation makes it extremely difficult to evaluate validation results and compare different traffic generators. We advocate the research for finding a common set of metrics for the validation and comparative evaluation of traffic generators.