Caliper: Precise and Responsive Traffic Generator

This paper presents Caliper, a highly-accurate packet injection tool that generates precise and responsive traffic. Caliper takes live packets generated on a host computer and transmits them onto a gigabit Ethernet network with precise inter-transmission times. Existing software traffic generators rely on generic Network Interface Cards which, as we demonstrate, do not provide high-precision timing guarantees. Hence, performing valid and convincing experiments becomes difficult or impossible in the context of time-sensitive network experiments. Our evaluations show that Caliper is able to reproduce packet inter-transmission times from a given arbitrary distribution while capturing the closed-loop feedback of TCP sources. Specifically, we demonstrate that Caliper provides three orders of magnitude better precision compared to commodity NIC: with requested traffic rates up to the line rate, Caliper incurs an error of 8 ns or less in packet transmission times. Furthermore, we explore Caliper's ability to integrate with existing network simulators to project simulated traffic characteristics into a real network environment. Caliper is freely available online.