April 2nd 2024
In case you missed it, you can now watch the recording of the recent P4 Developer Days Talk by Steffen Lindner (University of Tuebingen) on the P4TG traffic generator and analyzer.
“We present P4TG, an open-source P4-based traffic generator (TG) which runs on the programmable Intel Tofino ASIC. In generation mode, P4TG is capable of generating traffic up to 1 Tb/s split across 10x 100 Gb/s ports. Thereby it measures rates directly in the data plane. Generated traffic may be fed back from the output to the input ports, possibly through other equipment, to record packet loss, packet reordering, inter-arrival times (IATs) and sampled round trip times (RTTs). Further, it supports VLAN, QinQ, and MPLS encapsulation. In analysis mode, P4TG measures rates on the input ports and IATs, and forwards traffic through its output ports. Existing software or P4-based traffic generators either lack the required accuracy, do not support high data rates, or do not provide sufficiently integrated measurement capabilities.”