Generating Synthetic Voip Traffic for Analyzing Redundant Openbsd
UNIVERSITY OF OSLO Department of Informatics Generating Synthetic VoIP Traffic for Analyzing Redundant OpenBSD-Firewalls Master Thesis Maurice David Woernhard May 23, 2006 Generating Synthetic VoIP Traffic for Analyzing Redundant OpenBSD-Firewalls Maurice David Woernhard May 23, 2006 Abstract Voice over IP, short VoIP, is among the fastest growing broadband technologies in the private and commercial sector. Compared to the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS), Internet telephony has reduced availability, measured in uptime guarantees per a given time period. This thesis makes a contribution towards proper quantitative statements about network availability when using two redun- dant, state synchronized computers, acting as firewalls between the Internet (WAN) and the local area network (LAN). First, methods for generating adequate VoIP traffic volumes for loading a Gigabit Ethernet link are examined, with the goal of using a minimal set of hardware, namely one regular desktop computer. pktgen, the Linux kernel UDP packet generator, was chosen for generating synthetic/artificial traffic, reflecting the common VoIP packet characteristics packet size, changing sender and receiver address, as well as typical UDP-port usage. pktgen’s three main parameters influencing the generation rate are fixed inter-packet delay, packet size and total packet count. It was sought to relate these to more user-friendly val- ues of amount of simultaneous calls, voice codec employed and call duration. The proposed method fails to model VoIP traffic accurately, mostly due to the cur- rently unstable nature of pktgen. However, it is suited for generating enough packets for testing the firewalls. Second, the traffic forwarding limit and failover behavior of the redun- dant, state-synchronized firewalls was examined.
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