Search Results for « Synthetic Network Traffic »

Recently, motivated by the pioneer works in revealing the small-world effect and scale-free property of various real-life networks, many scientists devote themselves to studying complex networks. In this paper, we give a brief review on the studies of traffic flow and efficient routing on scale-free networks, including the traffic dynamics based on global routing protocol, Traffic dynamics based on local routing protocol, and the critical phenomena and scaling behaviors of real and artificial traffic. Finally, perspectives and some interesting problems are proposed.

Molecular motors perform active movements along cytoskeletal filaments and drive the traffic of organelles and other cargo particles in cells. In contrast to the macroscopic traffic of cars, however, the traffic of molecular motors is characterized by a finite walking distance (or run length) after which a motor unbinds from the filament along which it moves. Unbound motors perform Brownian motion in the surrounding aqueous solution until they rebind to a filament. We use variants of driven lattice gas models to describe the interplay of their active movements, the unbound diffusion, and the binding/unbinding dynamics. If the motor concentration is large, motor-motor interactions become important and lead to a variety of cooperative traffic phenomena such as traffic jams on the filaments, boundary-induced phase transitions, and spontaneous symmetry breaking in systems with two species of motors. If the filament is surrounded by a large reservoir of motors, the jam length, i.e., the extension of the traffic jams is of the order of the walking distance. Much longer jams can be found in confined geometries such as tube-like compartments.

Synthetic network traffic generation has emerged as a promising alternative for various data-driven applications in the networking domain. It enables the creation of synthetic data that preserves real-world characteristics while addressing key challenges such as data scarcity, privacy concerns, and purity constraints associated with real data. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of synthetic network traffic generation approaches, covering essential aspects such as data types and generation models. With the rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), we focus particularly on deep learning (DL)-based techniques while also providing a detailed discussion of statistical methods and their extensions, including commercially available tools. We present a comprehensive comparison of generation approaches and provide an AI tool to apply this comparison for any network traffic generation papers. Furthermore, we highlight open challenges in this domain and discuss potential future directions for further research and development. This survey serves as a foundational resource for researchers and practitioners, offering a structured analysis of existing methods, challenges, and opportunities in synthetic network traffic generation.

Adaptive-Cruise Control (ACC) automatically accelerates or decelerates a vehicle to maintain a selected time gap, to reach a desired velocity, or to prevent a rear-end collision. To this end, the ACC sensors detect and track the vehicle ahead for measuring the actual distance and speed difference. Together with the own velocity, these input variables are exactly the same as in car-following models. The focus of this contribution is: What will be the impact of a spreading of ACC systems on the traffic dynamics? Do automated driving strategies have the potential to improve the capacity and stability of traffic flow or will they necessarily increase the heterogeneity and instability? How does the result depend on the ACC equipment level? We discuss microscopic modeling aspects for human and automated (ACC) driving. By means of microscopic traffic simulations, we study how a variable percentage of ACC-equipped vehicles influences the stability of traffic flow, the maximum flow under free traffic conditions until traffic breaks down, and the dynamic capacity of congested traffic. Furthermore, we compare different percentages of ACC with respect to travel times in a specific congestion scenario. Remarkably, we find that already a small amount of ACC equipped cars and, hence, a marginally increased free and dynamic capacity, leads to a drastic reduction of traffic congestion.

To address the scarcity and privacy concerns of network traffic data, various generative models have been developed to produce synthetic traffic. However, synthetic traffic is not inherently privacy-preserving, and the extent to which it leaks sensitive information, and how to measure such leakage, remain largely unexplored. This challenge is further compounded by the diversity of model architectures, which shape how traffic is represented and synthesized. We introduce a comprehensive set of privacy metrics for synthetic network traffic, combining standard approaches like membership inference attacks (MIA) and data extraction attacks with network-specific identifiers and attributes. Using these metrics, we systematically evaluate the vulnerability of different representative generative models and examine the factors that influence attack success. Our results reveal substantial variability in privacy risks across models and datasets. MIA success ranges from 0% to 88%, and up to 100% of network identifiers can be recovered from generated traffic, highlighting serious privacy vulnerabilities. We further identify key factors that significantly affect attack outcomes, including dataset diversity and how well the generative model fits the training data. These findings provide actionable guidance for designing and deploying generative models that minimize privacy leakage, establishing a foundation for safer synthetic network traffic generation. We release our code and evaluation framework to support reproducibility and facilitate future research.

In order to closely simulate the real network scenario thereby verify the effectiveness of protocol designs, it is necessary to model the traffic flows carried over realistic networks. Extensive studies [1] showed that the actual traffic in access and local area networks (e.g., those generated by ftp and video streams) exhibits the property of self-similarity and long-range dependency (LRD) [2]. In this appendix we briefly introduce the property of self-similarity and suggest a practical approach for modeling self-similar traces with specified traffic intensity.

The application of machine learning models, particularly in cybersecurity, has surged significantly in the past few years. However, the effectiveness of these models is predominantly tethered to the quality and breadth of the training data they ingest. The scarcity of realistic datasets within the cybersecurity field constitutes a considerable challenge to the development of industry-grade tools intended for real-world application scenarios. Specifically, current datasets are either significantly outdated or fall short on both qualitative and quantitative fronts, primarily because many organizations exhibit reluctance in data sharing, stemming from privacy concerns or the potential threat to trade secrets. To address this challenge, the paper introduces PAC-GPT, a novel framework to generate reliable synthetic data for machine learning methods based on Open AI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3). The core components of this framework are two modules, namely a Flow Generator, which is responsible for capturing and regenerating patterns in a series of network packets, and Packet Generator, which can generate individual network packets given the network flow. We also propose a packet generator based on LLM chaining and then proceed to assess, compare, and evaluate its performance using metrics such as loss, accuracy and success rate, concluding that transformers are a suitable approach for synthetic packet generation with minimal fine-tuning performed. Lastly, a streamlined command line interface (CLI) tool has been devised to facilitate the seamless access of this innovative data generation strategy by professionals from various disciplines.

Preventing traffic congestion by forecasting near time traffic flows is an important problem as it leads to effective use of transport resources. Social network provides information about activities of humans and social events. Thus, with the help of social network, we can extract which humans will attend a particular event (in near time) and can estimate flow of traffic based on it. This opens up a wide area of research which poses need to have a framework for traffic management that can capture essential parameters of real-life behaviour and provide a way to iterate upon and evaluate new ideas. In this paper, we present building blocks of a framework and a system to simulate a city with its transport system, humans and their social network. We emphasize on relevant parameters selected and modular design of the framework. Our framework defines metrics to evaluate congestion avoidance strategies. To show utility of the framework, we present experimental studies of few strategies on a public transport system.

The fidelity and utility of synthetic network traffic are critically compromised by architectural mismatch across heterogeneous network datasets and prevalent scalability failure. This study addresses this challenge by establishing an Architectural Selection Framework that empirically quantifies how data structure compatibility dictates the optimal fidelity-utility trade-off. We systematically evaluate twelve generative architectures (both non-AI and AI) across two distinct data structure types: categorical-heavy NSL-KDD and continuous-flow-heavy CIC-IDS2017. Fidelity is rigorously assessed through three structural metrics (Data Structure, Correlation, and Probability Distribution Difference) to confirm structural realism before evaluating downstream utility. Our results, confirmed over twenty independent runs (N = 20), demonstrate that GAN-based models (CTGAN, CopulaGAN) exhibit superior architectural robustness, consistently achieving the optimal balance of statistical fidelity and practical utility. Conversely, the framework exposes critical failure modes, i.e., statistical methods compromise structural fidelity for utility (Compromised fidelity), and modern iterative architectures, such as Diffusion Models, face prohibitive computational barriers, rendering them impractical for large-scale security deployment. This contribution provides security practitioners with an evidence-based guide for mitigating architectural failures, thereby setting a benchmark for reliable and scalable synthetic data deployment in adaptive security solutions.