Patent ID: 7844432

Claim:
A method of emulating network traffic through a physical node comprising: (a) generating foreground traffic through the node, wherein the foreground traffic includes data packets; (b) simulating, at the node, a first background traffic and assigning a first simulated weight to the simulated first background traffic, the first simulated weight specifying a first proportion of available bandwidth capacity to be allocated to the first background traffic; (c) simulating, at the node, a second background traffic, for contention of the simulated second background traffic and the simulated first background traffic with the foreground traffic at the node and assigning a second simulated weight to the simulated second background traffic, the second simulated weight specifying a second proportion of available bandwidth capacity to be allocated to the simulated second background traffic, wherein the first simulated weight and the second simulated weight are different; (d) determining an effect of the simulated first and simulated second background traffic on the foreground traffic, wherein determining comprises: simulating a first queue and a second queue, the simulated first queue servicing the generated foreground traffic and the first background traffic, and the second simulated queue servicing the second background traffic; computing a size of the first simulated queue and a size of the second simulated queue, wherein the computing comprises calculating rates of growth for the first and second simulated queues; and determining the effect based on the computed sizes of the first and second simulated queues; and (e) making a forwarding decision with respect to the foreground traffic based on the effect, wherein the forwarding decision comprises one of forwarding a data packet through the node and discarding the data packet.