High-Speed Generation of Periodic Traffic Patterns on P4TG for DDoS and Burst-Load Evaluation
Traffic generators are essential tools for evaluating the robustness and performance of networked systems. P4TG is an open-source, hardware-accelerated traffic generator implemented in P4 for the Intel Tofino ASIC. It has been adopted by researchers and industry due to its flexibility and multi-terabit generation capability, and its low cost compared to other traffic generators. However, like most existing generators, it primarily produces constant bit rate traffic, which does not reflect the highly time-varying behavior observed in real networks, such as flashcrowds and microbursts. Such patterns are difficult to emulate at scale with current tools. We present a data plane mechanism for P4TG that shapes periodic, time-varying traffic patterns, including patterns representative of DDoS attacks and burst-load scenarios. Pattern shaping in P4TG can be applied to its generated traffic at an aggregate throughput of up to 4 Tbit/s. We evaluate pattern accuracy and analyze scalability across different sampling resolutions and periods. Further, we demonstrate practical use cases, including zero-loss throughput determination and buffer capacity measurement. Finally, we present microburst-based attack scenarios that overload UDP receivers, switch buffers, and degrade TCP throughput on shared links while remaining undetectable to conventional rate monitoring.