--- title: Flooding packets for VoIP testing - ECG description: It's sometimes useful to saturate a network with simple traffic to test your QoS measures. 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What you want is something that'll send a controlled amount of bandwidth. A [TCP-friendly](http://web.archive.org/web/20121005104242/http://www.psc.edu/index.php/projects/networking) connection won't work, because TCP slows down to the available amount of bandwidth. [iperf from NLANR](http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/) is one such tool. However, you have to have it running on both the sender and the receiver. I couldn't find anything quick and easy that would do it. [Here's a tool that does it.](http://web.archive.org/web/20090105231449/http://vielle.net/~mark/flood_udp.pl) You'll need Perl and [Time-HiRes](http://search.cpan.org/~jhi/Time-HiRes-1.9711/HiRes.pm) to use it. ``` #!/usr/bin/perl -w ## Mark R. Lindsey, lindsey@acm.org ## Flood a destination with fixed-sized UDP packets. use Time::HiRes qw( usleep ualarm gettimeofday tv_interval ); use IO::Socket; $number_of_args = $#ARGV + 1; if ($number_of_args < 3) { print "Usage: flood_udp.pl target_ip target_udp_port packets_per_second\n" ; die "Not enough arguments" } $target = $ARGV[0]; $target_port = $ARGV[1]; $packets_per_second = $ARGV[2]; $interpacket_delay_microseconds = 1 / $packets_per_second * 1000000; socket(BLAST, PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, getprotobyname("udp")); ## This assumes a 1500-byte path MTU. The idea is to make a maximum-sized packet without fragmentation. ## But if there's some fragmentation, that's not all so terrible. my $payload_size = 1472; my $ip_packet_size = $payload_size + 8; ## assuming Ethernet $msg = "u" x $payload_size; my $bytes_per_second = $ip_packet_size * $packets_per_second; my $bits_per_second = $bytes_per_second * 8; print "$bits_per_second bits/second, $bytes_per_second bytes/second\n"; print "Sending to $target at UDP port $target_port\n"; ## Send the UDP packet $ipaddr = inet_aton($target); $sendto = sockaddr_in($target_port,$ipaddr); while (1) { send(BLAST, $msg, 0, $sendto) ; usleep ($interpacket_delay_microseconds); } ``` ![](https://www.ecg.co/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/missing-image-Mar-25-2024-07-03-19-7278-AM.png) [testing](https://www.ecg.co/blog/tag/testing) ## Similar posts [![SIP and Fragments: Together Forever?](https://www.ecg.co/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/regular_26664897842_9f2f1b18db_o-1.jpg)](https://www.ecg.co/blog/125-sip-and-fragments-together-forever) ### [SIP and Fragments: Together Forever?](https://www.ecg.co/blog/125-sip-and-fragments-together-forever) [![See only a Sampling of RTP frames in a Wireshark Packet Capture](https://www.ecg.co/hubfs/ecg-site/blog-listing-placeholder.jpg)](https://www.ecg.co/blog/117-see-only-a-sampling-of-rtp-frames-in-a-wireshark-packet-capture) ### [See only a Sampling of RTP frames in a Wireshark Packet Capture](https://www.ecg.co/blog/117-see-only-a-sampling-of-rtp-frames-in-a-wireshark-packet-capture) [![Selling more than you have for sale](https://www.ecg.co/hubfs/ecg-site/blog-listing-placeholder.jpg)](https://www.ecg.co/blog/60-selling-more-than-you-have-for-sale) ### [Selling more than you have for sale](https://www.ecg.co/blog/60-selling-more-than-you-have-for-sale) ## Need Help With Your Network or AI Project? 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