The DAG monitors are located such that every
packet sent and received by the GenSyn traffic
generators are captured. The location of moni-
tors is shown in Figure 15. This instrumentation
enables accurate measurements to be taken of
necessary performance metrics like throughput,
unidirectional delay and loss.
3.3 Test Scenario Example
In order to describe the main deployment of
GenSyn, this section will describe a complete
scenario where the objective is to test the QoS
of various service classes under different QoS
support strategies. The focus is on the end-to-
end performance, particularly for the real-time
classes. Several traffic scenarios should be
defined for testing of the QoS mechanisms
in an IP network. In this section the different
components of the scenarios are described:
- Type of application (Web, FTP, VoIP, MPEG,
CBR, etc.); - Network configuration (best effort, differenti-
ation); - Protocol mixture (UDP/TCP ratio);
- Load level;
- Routing (balanced or single bottleneck).
3.3.1 The GenSyn Application Models
The following models are currently available in
the GenSyn framework.
TCP traffic– adjusts to the network perfor-
mance (slow-start window mechanism)
- Web– a model of users (clients) that down-
load web-pages with all their content (inclu-
sive applets and images) from real web
servers all over the world. The url addresses
are found in a parameter list of predefined
addresses that may dynamically be updated
as the experiment evolves.- FTP– a model of users (clients) that down-
load real files from a server. The files are
specified in a parameter list of files.
- FTP– a model of users (clients) that down-
UDP traffic– no network performance adapta-
tion at transport level
- VoIP– a model of the information/media
stream from VoIP users. It sends a determin-
istic stream of packets (fixed size and inter
packet arrival time) from each of the active
users. The model does not include the call
set-up and disconnection phases. - MPEG– a model of a video server that is
sending MPEG-1 coded video sequences
[Rose95]. All video frames are converted to a
number of fixed sized IP packets sent back to
back. The interframe distance is a parameter
with a default value as recommended by the
MPEG-1 codex standard. The clients are
implicitly modelled only as incoming requests. - CBR– a model of a multiplex of deterministic
streams of packets with phase shifts.
New models can be defined on request, and the
current models can easily be changed if this is
requested. In Figure 18 snapshots from the Gen-
Syn visualizer are included. The figure illus-
trates that GenSyn can generate packet flows
with very different traffic characteristics.
3.3.2 QoS Mechanisms and Service
Differentiation
There is a trend towards building communica-
tion platforms for integration of a great variety
of applications with different traffic characteris-
tics and users with different Quality of Service
requirements. There is a trend in networking
towards Full Service Network, i.e. a network for
all types of services. The various services and
applications need to be treated differently, and
hence some means for service differentiation is
required with different support for traffic man-
agement and control. In an IP based network
such differentiation and management techniques
are still a research topic. The proposed, and
a) FTP trace b) VoIP trace
c) CBR trace d) MPEG trace
Figure 18 Snapshot of 4
traces captured from the
visualizer in GenSyn