Performance Benchmarking, Service Activation Testing and On-Demand Troubleshooting

Synthetic Traffic Generation

Generate multiple synthetic traffic streams to emulate different types of network traffic and precisely control the rate of transmission of each stream. Test policers and shapers by creating bursty traffic and characterizing the forwarding results. Add sequence numbers and hardware-generated time stamps to track delay, jitter and loss on up to a million flows.

Packet Capture & Playback

An enormous 8GB capture buffer allows you to capture traffic in real-time at the press of a button. You can easily export these capture buffers right to any computer and decode them in Wireshark for analysis. Import saved PCAP files and play them back at the original rate or increase the playback rate to stress-test applications.

Filters, Actions and Field Punchers

Each test port is equipped with multiple micro-scan pattern matching engines to filter traffic at line-rate. Enable these micro-scan engines to detect flows or patterns in traffic and send them to a capture buffer for decode and further analysis. Use the Actions tab to perform field-swaps, copies and rewriting, allowing you to generate PDUs to emulate specific protocols.

Network Emulation

Add delay, jitter and loss to flows to emulate real network conditions. Over 6 seconds of delay can be introduced for a 10Gbps flow. Select between a Uniform, Normal, Exponential or Gamma latency/jitter distribution function and configure parameters for each to replicate different network behaviours. Impairment entities add periodic or pseudo-random loss to flows that can be averaged over user-configurable burst sizes.

Collectors

Collectors allow you to extract sequence number and time stamp information contained within synthetic test packets to produce ultra-accurate packet delay, jitter and loss measurements. Set various thresholds and bin your results to produce bucket-based statistics for performance reports.

RFC 2544

Network Equipment Manufacturers can benchmark the performance of their switch or router implementations using RFC 2544 test suites. Communication Service Providers can benchmark the performance of new or existing services. These test suites measure loss, delay, and permitted burst size. The RFC 2544 test suites can be used to test packet processors, ingress and egress queue implementations, service designs and network configurations.

Multi-Rate Interfaces

Each test port supports multiple PHY configurations. You can test 10Mbps to 10Gbps Ethernet interfaces all on the same platform.