Toward Synthetic Network Traffic Generating in NTN-Enabled IoT: A Generative AI Approach

Nonterrestrial networks (NTNs) enabled Internet of Things (IoT) extends connectivity to remote and underserved areas, enhances network reliability and coverage, and supports diverse IoT applications in challenging environments, such as rural, maritime, and disaster-stricken regions. As an emerging and fast-evolving IoT scheme, NTN-enabled IoT requires extensive evaluation to ensure effective deployment in real-world scenarios, such as connectivity, performance, and security evaluation. Since conducting testing in remote and diverse environments is logistically challenging and costly, we propose a generative artificial intelligence (GAI)-based synthetic traffic generation framework that facilitates comprehensive traffic analysis and performance evaluation. The proposed framework employs a GAI model to learn the traffic pattern and generate synthetic traffic from historical data. Our approach includes an embedding-based model for representing network flow attributes and a conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) for generating traffic flows. Considering both source-destination information and statistical features achieves more comprehensive characterization of traffic flows. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach can generate high quality traffic that conforms to real data distribution and shows obvious difference between multiple applications.