Ethernet Testing made easy with PacketExpert™ 10GX
16th, Jul 2020
GL Communications' Ethernet Tester - PacketExpert™ 10GX, provides cutting edge testing capabilities for Ethernet networks up to 10 Gbps.
PacketExpert™ 10GX Hardware Device
Overview
High-speed Ethernet links are widely found in local area networks, metropolitan area networks and wide area networks. Testing network performance of high-speed Ethernet links is challenging and requires specialized test tools. PacketExpert™ 10GX offers many industry standard testing modules including bit error rate testing, RFC 2544, loopback mode functionality, ITU-T Y.1564 for verifying service level agreements and RFC 6349 for TCP throughput testing. Furthermore, PacketExpert™ 10GX can function as a wirespeed network tap and can record and playback traffic onto a network. Also, within the tap configuration, PacketExpert™ 10GX can impair selected streams of traffic as they pass through the device. These impairments can be packet loss, bandwidth throttling, added latency, duplicated, reordered or corrupted packets. PacketExpert™ 10GX offers all these capabilities as optional licenses and is the most cost-effective solution on the market.
The PacketExpert™ 10GX includes two 10/1 Gbps optical ports, and two 10/100/1000 Mbps electrical/optical capable ports. The 10/1 Gbps optical ports can be downshifted to support 1 Gbps electrical ports, thus offering 4 electrical / 4 optical 1 Gbps ports for Ethernet testing. The same two 10 Gbps ports can be converted to 2.5 Gbps ports with an appropriate SFP and a simple software upgrade.
Important Modules
Wirespeed BERT measures the bit error rate on Framed Ethernet (Layer 2), MPLS (Layer 2.5), IP and UDP layers. It can generate various PRBS patterns such as 29-1, 211-1, 215-1, 220-1, 223-1, 229-1, and 231-1 including constant patterns such as All Ones, All Zeroes, Alternate Ones-Zeroes, and user-defined test patterns. This module also measures out-of-sequence packets and packet loss.
Smart Loopback automatically swaps the MAC and IP addresses and UDP ports and loops back incoming frames at full wirespeed up to 10 Gbps. Loopback is useful in many testing situations, where there is a need for a remote device looping back the test traffic.
RFC 2544 tests the performance of individual network elements. These metrics include throughput, latency, frame loss, and back-to-back tests. RFC 2544 can be done over Framed Ethernet (Layer 2), Stacked VLAN (Q-in-Q), Stacked MPLS, IP, & UDP.
ExpertSAM™ performs service level agreement verification. This module measures the committed information rate, excess information rate and other metrics of interest. 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. It is based on the ITU-T Y.1564 standard.
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 the user to capture only packets of interest, reducing the amount of data needed to transfer to the host PC.
PacketBroker™ acts as a network tap and captures wirespeed traffic in both directions. It also supports wirespeed filtering to capture only traffic of interest. The filtered packets can also trigger a TTL pulse which can be monitored from an oscilloscope.
IPNetSim™ supports Wide Area Network (WAN) emulation. This product emulates a WAN link, and introduces typical WAN impairments like bandwidth throttling, latency, packet loss, packet reordering, packet duplication, and packet corruption.
ExpertTCP™ test methodology is based on RFC 6349 to measure bi-directional TCP throughput, round trip delay and optimal window size. Supports up to 16 TCP streams simultaneously. ExpertTCP™ supports both Upstream (Client → Server) and Downstream (Server → Client) direction testing.
MTGA (Multi-stream Traffic Generation & Analysis) generates multiple streams of Ethernet traffic of varying packet lengths, data rates and protocols and analyzes the loopback traffic. Generate and analyze up to 16 streams of traffic up to the UDP layer.
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