Emulating Background Traffic with PCAP Replay

Perhaps the most important new feature added in Netropy v2.0, and certainly the most interesting, is the ability to replay PCAP files as background traffic. This feature makes it easy to see how other traffic on the network affects the performance of the application you’re testing. For example, if you want to see how well your mission-critical ERP system will work when two users are watching Netflix, five are doing Skype video chat, and the sales team is doing a WebEx presentation, Netropy can now simulate that easily. Just fire up a Netflix movie and record a few minutes of the stream with Wireshark or any other packet sniffer. Same for Skype and WebEx sessions. Netropy will run each stream continuously in a loop until stopped so you don’t need to record a long sample. Then import those files into the Netropy emulator. Then simply configure how many copies of each stream to run on the emulated WAN link. Want to simulate a hundred voice streams? Just capture one and have Netropy run a hundred copies. Or instead of reproducing individual applications, you can record a slice of all traffic on your network for a short period and replay it. You can adjust the timing to have it run slower or faster than the original to change the amount of bandwidth it consumes. This packet capture replay feature brings incredible power to accurately reproduce the conditions of your network — without the need for expensive and complicated traffic generators.