GL Enhances PacketScan™ for all wireless IP protocols
and traffic record for VQT

Welcome to another December 2018 issue of GL Communications' Newsletter providing information and insight into our enhanced PacketScan™ which supports recording of the voice traffic and works with Voice Band Analyzer (VBA), Delay Measurement tool to analyze and provide the Voice Quality (POLQA) and one-way delay metrics.

Overview

Wired and wireless networks are predominantly using packet techniques for transport of voice, video, fax, and data. Legacy protocols have converted to IP versions and new services like Internet of Things (IoT), Air Traffic Management, and IPTV have introduced new IP protocols. Simultaneously, IP transmission is achieving higher transmission rates, adding newer security features, encapsulating with powerful encryption, and enhancing quality using better codecs.

GL’s Packet Analyzers  - All IP PacketScan™, PacketScanHD™ , and NetSurveyorWEB™ are keeping pace with enhancements for wire-speed performance, the addition of more wireless protocol support, enhanced Quality of Service (QoS) and network performance metrics, and the addition of new and enhanced codecs.

GL's PacketScan™   All-IP Network Monitoring software offers powerful features to capture and monitor live signaling and traffic over IP (version 4 and 6). The application can capture, segregate, monitor and collect statistics all types of calls over IP. Almost all VoIP and Wireless protocols and traffic types over IP network can be captured and decoded for troubleshooting network problems.

GL’s PacketScanHD™ extends the support to wirespeed capture and analysis for high volume calls with simultaneous quality of experience metrics for measurement of degradation with call intensity, volume, or protocol. PacketScanHD™ is used during load and stress testing to verify stability of IP network and network elements pre- and post-deployment. PacketScan™ HD is a 2U rack mounted Network Monitoring Appliance w/ 4x1GigE and w/2x10GigE network interface cards that can capture and process high volumes of protocols over IP and Wireless networks.

GL's Network Monitoring and Diagnostic Systems are web-based applications that facilitate display of CDRs by connecting to TDM, Optical, or IP probes through a web server for monitoring physical layer, signaling and traffic. Currently supported protocols include SIP, VoIP (SIGTRAN, SIP, H.323), SS7, ISDN, GSM, TRAU, CAP MAP, IuCS, IuPS, LTE, and GSM A. It is based on a scalable and flexible architecture and is used in conjunction with GL's Protocol Analyzer probes to non-intrusively monitor from one or many testing locations. GL's protocol analysis probes feed data to centralized database (Oracle) in real-time for further analysis. The NetSurveyorWeb™ client application then locally or remotely facilitates to view records from the database using a simple web browser application.


Important Functions

GL's PacketScan™ supports non-intrusive real-time capture and monitoring of all wireless IP protocols such as IMS, LTE, UMTS, GSM, GPRS, SIGTRAN, and also VOIP communication protocols viz., SIP, H.323, Skinny, and Megaco.

The Packet Data Analysis (PDA) module within PacketScan™ provides in-depth real-time and post-process data investigation. It provides detailed call detail record (CDR) of each call and Quality of Service (QOS) parameters that include E-model (G.107) based MOS/R-Factor scores, Packet Loss, Delay, and Jitter for voice calls. PDA has complex filtering and search capabilities to record all or filtered traffic into a trace file and almost all industry standard codecs are supported.

The PacketScan™ provides the capability of Audio Capture and Playback, and Fax Call Capture and Decode (extracting fax images in TIFF format). The Triggers and Actions feature of the application allows filtering calls based on call parameters and perform different actions (save call, record audio,send e-mail etc) on the saved calls.

PacketScan™ can act as a probe to monitor the network and send CDR to a centralized database server. GL's NetSurveyorWeb™ can retrieve data from the database server and act as Central Monitoring System. It features rich graphics, ladder diagrams and CDRs.


Enhancements


  • Voice Quality Metrics

    PacketScan™ application is enhanced to record the voice traffic. The Voice Band Analyzer (VBA) application analyze the captured voice traffic and provide the Voice Quality metrics (POLQA), which can be viewed through NetSurveyorWeb™ Lite application.
    Important measurements provided by this application are listed below –
    • Speech Metrics measured in accordance with ITU-T P.56 Method B
      • Active Speech Level (ASL in dBm)
      • noise level (NL in dBm)
      • speech activity factor (AF in %)
      • power measurements (RMS, dRMS in dBm, DC Level in %FS)
      • clipped samples
      • DC level
      • detail voice band events occurrence during the call including reporting of traffic as tones (ring, busy), digits (DTMF, MF, MFC-R2), fax tones, modem signals, and more
    • Traffic Classifier to detect, classify, and display the amount of traffic - whether its Voice, Digits, Tones, or Silence present in the network
    • Tone Decoder can detect and decode all types of phone tones
  • Delay Measurement

    PacketScan™ also works with Delay Measurement tools to analyze captured voice traffic and provide precise one-way delay metrics. For a given call which traverse through Gateway, traffic is sampled at both TDM and IP analyzer at the same point of time running in the same server. These captured segments of SIP and ISDN calls will be saved in *.pcm formats. These samples will be given to delay measurement module which compares the samples based on the timestamp and provides the delay metrics.
  • PacketScan™ with NetSurveyorWeb™ Lite

    PacketScan™ now works with NetSurveyorWeb™ Lite, which provides a historical storage of data (up to 9GB), retrieval, querying, display of Call Detail Records (CDRs), and build custom KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

    The below screen shot depicts the Voice traffic KPIs derived from VBA statistics in NetSurveyorWeb Lite application.

Voice Traffic Analysis KPIs

  • Packet Data Analyzer (PDA)

    PDA is enhanced to support monitoring of all 2G, 3G and 4G wireless communication protocols such as LTE (S1, S5 S8, Diameter), IuCS, IuPS, GSM A, Abis, MAP, INAP, CAP, GnGp, BICC, SIGTRAN, in addition to the VoIP protocols viz., SIP, MGCP, MEGACO, Skinny, and H.323.

Packet Data Analysis View


  • Enhanced PacketScan™ supports monitoring and analysis of Air-to-Ground and Ground-to-Ground calls over VoIP based Air Traffic Control networks. It supports decoding of feature specific RTP header extensions as per ED-137 standards.

  • PacketScan™ provides option to select the required CDR fields and export frame details of each call to CSV files during real-time analysis for all supported protocols.

CDR - Field Selection and Export to CSV Options

  • PacketScan™ includes support for new EVS and OPUS codec in addition to large number of codecs - visit "List of Codecs" webpage for details on supported codecs.

Back to Newsletter Index Page Back to Newsletter Index Page