2.5 Gbps Ethernet Testing made easy with PacketExpert™

Overview

The increasing number of internet connected devices including high powered mobile phones, home cameras and smart appliances puts high bandwidth pressure on existing 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) networks. As a result, higher speed 2.5 Gbps technology is being deployed throughout the world. A convenient advantage of 2.5 Gbps networks is that it can use existing cabling infrastructure. This allows network administrators to upgrade their existing networks without major investments in infrastructure. The move to 2.5 Gbps is necessitating the need for Ethernet testing at 2.5 Gbps.

GL Communications, a worldwide leader in Ethernet testing, has added 2.5 Gbps support on its existing 1Gbps/10 Gbps testing platform – PacketExpert™ 10GX. This enhancement makes the PacketExpert™ 10GX platform even more flexible, in that users can test three speeds – 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps, all using the same hardware. For existing users, the two 10 Gbps ports, already present, can be converted to 2.5 Gbps ports with an appropriate SFP and a simple software upgrade.

The entire range of testing applications that are available for 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps speeds are also available for 2.5 Gbps. These include:

• Wirespeed Bit Error Rate Testing (BERT) capability measures Bit Error Rate on Layer 1, Framed Ethernet (Layer2), MPLS (Layer2.5), IP and UDP layers. It can generate various PRBS patterns such as 2^9-1, 2^11-1, 2^15-1, 2^20-1, 2^23-1, 2^29-1, and 2^31-1 including constant patterns such as all ones, all zeroes, alternate ones-zeroes and user-defined test patterns ranging from 1 bit to 32 bits. Selection of optional sequence number insertion allows detecting out-of-sequence packets and packet loss.
• Smart Loopback to automatically swap the MAC, IP and UDP address/port and loops back incoming frames at Wirespeed. Loopback can test both the transmitting and receiving capabilities of a device.  
• RFC 2544 tests  the performance  of individual network elements. These include throughput, latency, frame loss, and back-to-back tests. Similar to BERT, RFC 2544 can be done over Framed Ethernet (Layer 2), stacked VLAN (Q-in-Q), stacked MPLS, IP, & UDP.
• ExpertSAM™ is intended for multiservice testing to measure the maximum performance of the device or the network under test. ExpertSAM™ is a set of procedures that test the ability of Ethernet-based services to carry a variety of traffic (voice, data, and video) at defined performance levels.
• Wirespeed Capture and Playback module allows network administrators to capture traffic at Wirespeed and precisely simulate/recreate live network traffic conditions. A powerful wirespeed hardware-based filter allows you to capture only packets of interest, reducing bandwidth and memory consumption.
• PacketBroker™ acts as a network tap and captures wirespeed traffic in both directions. It also supports wirespeed filtering to capture only traffic of interest. It also allows certain packet modifications to insert useful information such as timestamp into the packet before sending out on DROP ports. Simultaneously the filtered packets can be monitored with TTL signal generation.
• IPLinkSim™ and IPNetSim™ products support Wide Area Network (WAN) emulation. These products emulate a WAN link and introduce typical WAN impairments like bandwidth throttling, latency, jitter, packet loss, packet reordering, packet duplication, packet corruption, congestion emulation etc.
• ExpertTCP™ test methodology is based on the RFC 6349 to measure bi-directional TCP throughput, round trip time and optimal window size. Generate and analyze up to 12 TCP streams of traffic of various packet lengths. ExpertTCP™ supports both upstream (client → server) and downstream (server → client) direction testing.
• MTGA (Multi-stream Traffic Generation & Analysis) generates multi-stream Ethernet traffic of varying packet length and analyzes the loopback traffic. Generate and analyze up to 16 UDP streams of traffic of various packet lengths. This tool finds itself especially useful for end-to-end testing of 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps WAN links.

For comprehensive information on the application, please refer to our PacketExpert™ webpage.

Please review the above and give us a call if you are interested in the above product/software or for any other applications listed in our website. We would be happy to discuss your testing needs and we look forward to hearing from you.

Warm Regards,
Shelley Sharma
Phone: 301-670-4784 x114
Email: info@gl.com

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