PPP Protocol Analyzer

Overview

The MLPPP Analyzer can be used to capture and decode a host of PPP protocols exchanged between pairs of nodes over T1 E1 links. It provides useful analysis of the PPP, MLPPP, and MC-MLPPP protocols which includes distribution of protocols, protocol fields, frame lengths and frame status.

A user can obtain detail analysis of the protocol and can perform various statistics measurements. MLPPP analyzer also supports Packet Data Analysis module (requires additional license) to perform detail analysis of MLPPP packets over IP and segregates them into SIP / H323 / Megaco / MGCP / T.38 Fax calls.

GL Communications supports the following types of MLPPP analyzers:

• Real-time MLPPP Analyzer with Packet Data Analysis (Pre-requisites: GL's field proven E1 or T1 internal cards or USB Laptop E1 or T1 external units, required licenses and Windows Operating System)
• Offline/Remote MLPPP Analyzer (Pre-requisites: Hardware Dongle and Windows Operating System)

The Packet Data Analysis  is an outstanding tool for live monitoring of signaling and traffic over IP.Packet Data Analysis (PDA) is distributed with GL’s Packet Analyzers, allowing users to monitor live IP networks including capture, analysis, and reporting of every call in detail. Supported protocols include SIP, MEGACO, MGCP, H.323, SCCP, RANAP (UMTS IuCS), and GSM A. It can capture IP packets over different transmission lines, including IP, T1, E1, T3, E3, and OC-3 STM-1 / OC-12 STM-4. PDA then processes the captured packets, identifies, and segregates calls based on signaling and traffic parameters. Refer to Packet Data Analysis in MLPPP webpage for more details.

In addition, GL's T1 E1 Analyzer includes client-server based MC-MLPPP Emulator that can further help in analysis & emulation of MC-MLPPP, MLPPP, & PPP.

Main Features

• Supports a host of protocols PPP, MLPPP, Multi-class MLPPP, IPCP, BCP, PPP MUX CP, IEC, CRTP, BPDU, PAP, CHAP, SNMP, STUN, DNS, and DHCP.
• Ability to test and perform numerous measurements across WAN- LAN or LAN-LAN connection.
• Ability to test and analyze HDLC based PPP protocol, PPP SIGTRAN, and PPP over IP protocols in synchronous environment.
• Search and filtering capabilities for both real-time as well as offline analysis
• Option to create multiple aggregate column groups and prioritize the groups as per the requirement to display the summary results efficiently
• Allows the user to create search/filter criteria automatically from the current screen selection
• Displays Summary, Detail, Hex-dump, Statistics, and Call Trace Views, the contents of this view can also be copied to clipboard.
• Summary View provides the information about few important fields (Dev #, Time Slot, Layer 3 Protocol, LCP message type and higher protocol specific information like Destination and Source IP address, Destination and Source TCP as well as UDP port details, and so on).
• Statistics View displays statistics based on frame count, byte count, frames/sec, bytes/sec etc for the entire capture data.
• Hex dump view displays raw frame data as hexadecimal and ASCII octet dump, the contents of this view can also be copied to clipboard.
• Detail View displays decodes of user-selected frames from the Summary View.
• Provides reassembly error details regardless of which fragment is missing/erred. Includes counters for fcs errors, reassembled erred packets, and number of duplicate packets

• Also supports Packet Data Analysis module for real-time IP call analysis including SIP, RTP, MEGACO, H.323, & MGCP & T.38 Fax calls.
• Any protocol field can be added to the summary view, filtering, and search features providing users more flexibility to monitor required protocol fields.
• Supports decoding of frames with two MLPPP layers.
• Detail information of all the captured Frames or only the filtered frames can be exported to ASCII file for the further off-line analysis and printed.
• Capability to export Summary View details to comma separated values (CSV) format for subsequent import into a database or spreadsheet.
• Capability to export detail decodes information to an ASCII file.
• Multiple bundle of MLPPP traffic on various T1 E1 channels can be simultaneously decoded with-in same or different GUI instances.
• Ability to configure .INI file to customize sequence fragment format.
• Remote monitoring capability using GL's Network Surveillance System.

Additional features supported by MLPPP Real-time Analyzer:

• A single instance of the analyzer supports reassembly and decoding of multiple MLPPP bundles simultaneously. Each MLPPP bundle is created by selecting groups of timeslots on various cards. Each group of timeslot selection can have different data rates.
• Supports CRC selection with CRC-16, CRC-32, and CRC-NONE options for each link in MLPPP bundle.
• Various data transmission rates starting from fractional DS0 to DS1 (subchannels) are supported. Frames can be transmitted/captured in either, n x 64 kbps, or n x 56 kbps data channels.
• Supports selection of TS0 in E1 analyzer for the analysis of unframed data.
• The other variations accommodated in the software are inverted or non-inverted data, byte reversal or non-reversal, and MLPPP options such as fragment format (long or short), & maximum differential delay.
• Ability to capture and decode both PPP routed protocols, PPP bridged protocols, MLPPP and MC-MLPPP streams of data.
• User can decode frames from the recorded trace files and can be played back using HDLC playback application.

Additional features supported by Offline MLPPP Analyzer:

• Trace files for analysis can be loaded through simple command-line arguments.
• Multiple trace files can be loaded simultaneously with different GUI instances for offline analysis.

References

• RFC 1661 Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) and Link Control Protocol (LCP)
• RFC 1662 Physical Layer and HDLC Layer
• RFC1990 Multi-link PPP bundles
• RFC2686 Multi-class extensions to PPP
• RFC 1332 The PPP Internet Protocol Control Protocol
• RFC 1877 PPP Internet Protocol Control Protocol Extensions for Name Server Addresses
• RFC 3518 PPP Bridging Control Protocol
• RFC 1144 Van Jacobson Compression
• RFC 3544 IPHC Compression
• RFC 2507 only IP Compression
• RFC 2508 Compressed RTP
• RFC 3153 PPP Network Control Protocol for PPP Multiplexing (PPPMuxCP)