Traffic Generators Survey

Overview

We carried out a survey of over 90 traffic generators and more than 7000 networking related research papers to examine how workload is generated in networking research projects.

List of Traffic Generators

A full list of the over 90 network traffic generators is at: traffic generator list

List of the Papers Considered in the Survey

A list of titles, conference/journal name and author for the about 7000 papers over the last 13 years is at: ACM SIGCOMM related papers list and USENIX papers list. These papers constituted our study for traffic workload generation methods in research papers.

Paper Analysis Tool

We conducted a detailed n-gram analysis of all 7000+ papers. First, we created a list of terms/phrases that uniquely describe each identified generator, collected from a sample of referenced papers. n-gram indices with n = 1 to 5 were then created from the raw text of the entire corpus of selected papers. These indices were located as terms/phrases across the entire set of papers. For each match, a script captured the surrounding sentences for the location of the match. A manual examination of the sentences was made to determine whether the generator was actually used, cited, or just merely mentioned in the paper. The scripts and the citation lists for the search and analysis of papers are included here.