traffic generation
termnetworking
Producing synthetic traffic with known properties in order to measure what a device or network does with it.
The point is not volume, it is control: you know exactly what was sent, so anything missing, late or reordered is attributable. That is why the discipline sits closer to instrumentation than to networking, and why the equipment is bought by test labs, carriers accepting a circuit, and vendors who must publish a number. The harder use is scenario recreation - reproducing a fault that happened once in production, under conditions you control, until it happens on demand. Most difficult problems are not solved by inspecting the broken system but by rebuilding the circumstances that broke it.
Also known as: traffic generator, test traffic, scenario recreation