Internet evolution is driven by a continuous stream of new applications and users driving the demand for services. To keep up with this, a never-stopping research has been transforming the Internet ecosystem over the time. Technological changes on both protocols (the uptake of IPv6) and network architectures (the adoption of Software Defined Networking) introduced new challenges for ASIC designers. In particular, IPv6 and OpenFlow increased the complexity of the rule matching problem, pushing researchers to build new packet classification algorithms capable to keep pace with a steady growth of link speed.

A lot of research effort identifies better lookup techniques capitalizing on the characteristics of rule sets. So far, the availability of small numbers of real rule sets and synthetic ones, generated with tools such as ClassBench, has boosted research in the IPv4 world. Starting from an analysis of rule sets taken from operational environments, we present ClassBench-ng, a new open source tool for the generation of synthetic IPv4, IPv6, and OpenFlow 1.0 rule sets exposing the same properties of real ones. We feel this tool can meet the requirements of nowadays researchers, boosting the rule matching research as ClassBench has done since ten years ago.