TCPivo: A High Performance Packet Replay Engine

TCPivo is a tool that provides high-speed packet replay from a trace file using standard PC hardware and freely available open-source software [1]. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant EIA-0130344 and the generous donations of Intel Corporation. Note that the tool was formerly known as NetVCR. As an existing network product has the same name, we were forced to rename it to the less catchier "TCPivo". A subsequent validation of our tool has also been performed [2].

Publications

[1] W. Feng, A. Goel, A. Bezzaz, W. Feng, J. Walpole, "TCPivo: A High-Performance Packet Replay Engine", ACM SIGCOMM 2003 Workshop on Models, Methods, and Tools for Reproducible Network Research (MoMeTools), August 2003. Paper: pdf, Poster: sxi | ppt | pdf, Slides: sxi | ppt | pdf
[2] S. Lange, "Analysis and Performance of Packet Replay Programs", TU Munchen report, November 2004. pdf

Software

Note: This is currently work-in-progress and requires several patches to the Linux kernel for maximum performance. Among other things, a low-latency kernel patch, a pre-emptible kernel patch, and a firm timer patch is required in order to support gigabit rates. For those using Linux 2.5, a number of these improvements have already been placed into the branch.

TCPivo/NetVCR source code 92MB tarfile
OGI/OHSU firm timers for Linux 2.4 kernels from the Time-sensitive Linux project page.
Andrew Morton's Low-latency patches for Linux 2.4 kernels
Robert Love's kernel pre-emption patches for Linux 2.4 kernels.

wuchang at cs . pdx . edu