Traffic Generator

The first plug-in that can be found in NetMeter's test sidebar is the UDP Traffic Generator. This plugin can generate UDP traffic in a network and can pick up the measurements to calculate the OWD (One Way Delay) between two synchronized points A (Source) and B (Destination) of an IP network. OWD is the time that a packet spends in travelling across the IP network from A to B. This plugin uses another non-provided application called MGen to generate the traffic. MGen can be freely downloaded from: http://pf.itd.nrl.navy.mil/mgen/mgen.html.

Three sections compose the interface. The first one, “Test Properties” is used to describe the test's name and the test's identifier (both are optional), the source port that Mgen will use and Mgen's version. On the right, “Test Hosts” must be filled with some information about the source and the destination. The user must provide the test address, management address, user name and password (used to control the execution) and application's paths (of Mgen, Drec and Decode if necessary).

The characteristics of the traffic generated by NetMeter are specified in the last section, called “Flow Management”. On the left, we can find a blank space that is used to add new flows and new modifications of this flows. Flows and modifications can be added and removed with right button of the mouse or pressing the green tick / red cross, respectively, in the button bar.