Complete Ethernet/Packet & Sonet/SDH Test & Analysis
(Wirespeed BERT to Protocol Analysis & Emulation up to 10 Gbps)

Welcome to another issue of GL's Newsletter providing information on our multi-functional Ethernet/IP & SONET/SDH test solution PacketExpert™/SonetSDHExpert™. The ONLY product on the market to perform wirespeed BERT testing to comprehensive protocol analysis in a single system.

PacketExpert™/SonetSDHExpert™ 10GX Hardware

The current network is hybrid (SONET/SDH TDM and Ethernet/Packet) with wide ranging speeds (64 kbps to 400 Gbps); carries data, voice, image, and video over both technologies. Test equipment that can test and analyze from physical, transport, and higher layers of the ISO stack is just NOT available, until now. Enter GL’s PacketExpert™/SonetSDHExpert™ that covers an unbelievable range of physical interfaces, transport protocols, and traffic types - from voice to video, ISDN to SIP/RTP, circuit switched TDM to packet, SONET/SDH, ATM, POS, to name a few.

GL’s PacketExpert™/SonetSDHExpert™ is a high-speed Ethernet/IP and Sonet/SDH test solution for local, metropolitan, and wide area networks spanning high speed TDM and Ethernet technologies. It supports industry standard functionalities for both Packet and Sonet/SDH networks and includes electrical and optical SFP and SFP+ versatility from 10 Mbps Ethernet to 10 Gbps Ethernet/Sonet/SDH.

Comprehensive software provided with the hardware permits wirespeed functions from raw BERT to powerful deep packet protocol analysis. Analyze and test up to 10 Gbps packet traffic or Sonet/SDH traffic carrying ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), POS (Packet over Sonet), and Channelized T1 and E1s inside OC-192/STM-64 pipes. Practically every packet and TDM protocol, every codec, and every type of traffic is supported from ISDN to SIP, RTP to 64 kbps PCM, Fax over IP to Fax overTDM (T.38 to T.30), SS7 to SIGTRAN, Wireless infrastructure protocols associated with 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G.

Some of the functionalities are briefly summarized below,

Sonet/SDH Mode - Physical Layer and Protocol Analysis/Emulation

• Unchannelized ATM/POS/RAW - From OC-3/STM-1 to OC-192/STM-64 rates, Monitor, BERT, Tx/Rx Test, Protocol Analysis, Record/Playback, all protocols
• Channelized - From OC-3/STM-1 to OC-12/STM-4 rates, extraction, analysis, emulation of T1s and E1s, up to 8064 PCM channels simultaneously. BERT, Monitor, Tx/Rx Test, Voice, Fax
• Protocol analysis for HDLC, ISDN, SS7, Frame Relay, GR-303, ATM, GSM, MLPPP, TRAU, GPRS, CDMA, V5.x, CAS, UMTS, E1 Maintenance Data Link, T1 Facility Data Link, SS1, DCME

Packet Mode - Wirespeed bit error rate testing (BERT), RFC 2544 / Y.1564 / RFC 6349 tests, packet capture, event-driven triggers and actions, traffic playback, impairment generation, stacked VLAN/MPLS tests, and many others. With the addition of a protocol analysis software, the PacketExpert becomes a wirespeed protocol analyzer to rival the most complex deep packet inspection tasks.

The entire range of testing applications that are available for 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps, and 10 Gbps speeds are:

• Wirespeed Bit Error Rate Testing (BERT) capability measures Bit Error Rate on Layer 1, 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 ranging from 1 bit to 32 bits. Selection of optional sequence number insertion allows detecting out-of-sequence packets and packet loss.
• Smart Loopback application tells the PacketExpert™ to automatically swap the source and destination MAC and IP addresses and UDP ports and loop back the incoming frames at wirespeed. This mode facilitates end-to-end network testing.
• 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 based on the ITU-T Y.1564 standard and 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 application allows network administrators to capture traffic at wirespeed and precisely 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 the timestamp into the packet before sending it 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 and byte errors.
• 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) 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 is useful for end-to-end testing of 1 Gbps, 2.5 Gbps and 10 Gbps WAN links.

Ethernet/IP Protocol Analysis Mode - Wirespeed Ethernet/IP traffic upto 10 Gbps can be captured and transferred to the host PC for detailed real time protocol analysis by the PacketScan software. Combination of PacketExpert hardware and PacketScan software is named “PacketScanPX”

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PacketScan™ All-IP Signaling and Traffic Analysis

• Capture and analyse of traffic on either 1G ports or 10G ports (two 1G ports or two 10G ports)
• Capture and analyse at full wirespeed up to 8 Gbytes of traffic utilizing the onboard 8 GB DDR3 RAM
• Capture and analyse continuously at reduced rates of up to 2 Gbps (depends on the conditions)
• Segregates, captures, and collects statistics on VoIP and Wireless calls
• Supports decoding of almost all industry standard signaling protocols such as SIP, SIP-I, SIP-T, H.323, MEGACO, MGCP, Skinny (SCCP), IMS-SIP, Diameter, LTE, SIGTRAN – SS7, ISDN, GSM A and Abis over IP, GPRS Gb and Gn over IP, UMTS IuCs and IuPs over IP, T.38 and Video calls, and ED-137/ED-138
• Monitor progress of up to 2000 simultaneous calls with bidirectional RTP traffic
• Complex Filtering capabilities to filter incoming filtered traffic at the hardware level, and forward to packet analyzer
• Create up to 16 user defined hardware filters per port to filter-out traffic based on MAC, VLANs, IP, MPLS, TCP, UDP, Frame size and Raw Hex Bytes parameters
• Users can select a frame in Summary View to analyze and decode each frame in the Detail View. Options provided to hide/display, and copy content to clipboard
• Option to search for a particular call detail record from the captured traces
• The Hex dump view displays the frame information in HEX and ASCII octet dump format
• Ability to export Summary View, and Detail View information to a comma delimited file for subsequent import into a database or spreadsheet
• Precise hardware timestamping with accuracy in microseconds

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