Traffic Generation System for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Spectrum Collaboration Challenge

Abstract

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Spectrum Collaboration Challenge(SC2) required competitors to develop shared spectrum solutions for next-generation communication systems. To enable competitors to test their designs and DARPA to measure and evaluate their utility, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) designed and built a wireless research test bed called the Colosseum. One of its components, the Traffic Generation System, enabled on-demand generation and logging of Internet Protocol (IP) version 4 (IPv4) traffic in the Colosseum. The Traffic Generation System simulated a set of network applications running simultaneously on a group of peer nodes, such as a video conferencing application connecting four participants. The Traffic Generation System provided a continuous and unpredictable stream of traffic so that competitors could be measured against a maximum expected traffic flow transmitted through their radios with no possibility of gaining an unfair advantage. IP traffic provides good evaluation metrics because IP packets can be counted, and statistics such as data throughput, latency, jitter, and loss can be calculated. This article discusses the software, hardware, and networking design of the Traffic Generation System.