Patent ID: 9313115
Filing Date: 2016-04-12
CPC Classification: H04L

Claim Text:
1. A traffic generator to generate and transmit test traffic over a network under test, comprising: a scheduler configured to determine a sequence of packets to be transmitted as the test traffic, each packet in the sequence of packets belonging to one of a plurality of flow control groups; a pipeline of three or more processing engines, including a first processing engine, and a last processing engine configured to output completed packets for transmission over the network under test, and a second processing engine intermediate the first processing engine and the last processing engine, each of the three or more processing engines configured to perform respective sequential stages of a packet generation process; and a first bank of first-in-first-out (FIFO) queues, the first bank of FIFO queues including a plurality of FIFO queues associated respectively with the plurality of flow control groups; and a second bank of FIFO queues, the second bank of FIFO queues including a plurality of FIFO queues associated respectively with the plurality of flow control groups, wherein: for each packet in the sequence of packets, the first processing engine stores first packet forming data in the FIFO queue, from the first bank of FIFO queues, associated with the flow control group to which each packet belongs and the second processing engine stores second packet forming data in the FIFO queue, from the second bank of FIFO queues, associated with the flow control group to which each packet belongs, the second processing engine is configured to provide the first processing engine with data indicating whether or not each FIFO queue in the second bank of FIFO queues can accept additional second packet forming data, and when one or more FIFO queues in the second bank of FIFO queues cannot accept additional second packet forming data, the first processing engine is configured to stop performing the respective stage of the packet generation process for packets belonging to one or more corresponding flow control groups.