PIPO-TG: Parameterizable High-Performance Traffic Generation

In recent years, the increasing demand for network resources due to real-time applications and data-intensive activities has posed challenges in managing and optimizing network performance. To assess network performance, security, and efficiency, traffic generation plays a crucial role. We introduce PIPO-TG, a Tofino-based traffic generation for high-performance experiments. The primary objective of PIPO-TG is to generate realistic and diverse traffic patterns, enabling researchers to evaluate network performance under varying conditions providing customizable packet forwarding with P4 programmable data planes. Our main contributions include user-defined packet header customization and open-source code for reproducibility. These efforts foster collaboration within the research community to advance traffic generation techniques. We show that PIPO-TG only requires a few lines of code to simulate heterogeneous network scenarios (e.g., traffic bursts and DDoS attacks) while maintaining hardware performance and flexibility.