Time controlled network traffic shaper

Abstract: Network performance metrics such as delay variations and packet loss influence the performance of the network. As a consequence, the performance of applications on the network is also affected as most of the networked applications existing today are very much sensitive to the network performance. Therefore it is of utmost importance to test the intensity of such network level disturbances on the performance of applications. A network traffic shaper/emulator shapes the network traffic in terms of these performance metrics to test such applications in a controlled environment. Most of the traffic shapers existing today give the instantaneous step transition in delay and packet loss on network. In this work, we present time-controlled network traffic shaper, a tool that facilitates testing and experimentation of network traffic through emulation. It focuses on time variant behavior of the traffic shaper. A linear transition of delay and packet loss that is varying with respect to time may fits much better to the real network scenarios instead of an instantaneous step transition in delay and packet loss. This work illustrates the emulation capabilities of time-controlled network traffic shaper and presents its design architecture. Several approaches are analyzed to do the task and one of them is followed to develop the desired architecture of the shaper. The shaper is implemented in a small scenario and is tested to see whether the desired output is achieved or not. The shortfalls in the design of the shaper are also discussed. Results are presented that show the output from the shaper in graphical form. Although the current implementation of the shaper does not provide linear or exponential output but this can be achieved by implementing a configuration setting that is comprised of small transition values that are varying with respect to very small step sizes of time e.g. transitions on milli seconds or micro seconds. The current implementation of the shaper configuration provides the output with a transition of one milli second on every next second.