DCT2Gen: A traffic generator for data centers

Only little is publicly known about traffic in non-educational data centers. Recent studies made some knowledge available, which gives us the opportunity to create more realistic traffic models for data-center research. We used this knowledge to create the first publicly available traffic generator that produces realistic traffic between hosts in data centers of arbitrary size.We characterize traffic by using six probability distribution functions and concentrate on the generation of traffic on flow-level. The distribution functions are easily exchangeable to enable using up-to-date traffic characteristics whenever new data is available from publications or own experiments. Moreover, in data centers, traffic between hosts in the same rack and hosts in different racks have different properties. We model this phenomenon, making our generated traffic very realistic. We carefully evaluated our approach and conclude that it reproduces these characteristics with accuracy.