SCENARIO
Media convergence is fueling the growth and complexity of today’s IP networks. To effectively compete, service providers must deliver differentiated multiplay services, including voice over IP (VoIP), peer-to-peer (P2P) gaming, IP television (IPTV), streaming media, high-speed internet, and mobile services over converged networks. There are numerous challenges associated with the delivery of multiplay services due to the different characteristics of voice, video, and data traffic:
• Voice traffic consumes fairly low bandwidth but is highly sensitive to network jitter.
• Video services require a steady stream of high-bandwidth traffic and are severely impacted by packet reordering and loss.
• Data services, such as Web browsing, file transfer, and other end user interactive applications, have varying requirements
Proper QoS provisioning, performance analysis, and capacity planning are key requirements for ensuring a successful service rollout and sustained growth.
Today’s data center networks support a complex application delivery infrastructure that must recognize, prioritize, and manage application traffic with differentiated classes of service. The emergence of integrated service routers (ISRs), application-aware firewalls, server load balancers, WAN accelerators, and devices that use DPI enable service providers to deliver superior application performance and security while improving user QoE.
Equipment vendors need a comprehensive test solution for validating the functional capabilities, performance, and scalability of their next-generation hardware platforms. Enterprises and service providers face similar challenges as they attempt to ensure that their networks can deliver on performance and availability requirements, while maintaining proper QoS for all mission-critical data, voice, and video traffic.
IXIA SOLUTIONS
The requirements for testing application-aware devices are complex and resource-intensive. You need to exercise devices beyond their limits to ensure optimal functionality, performance, availability, and reliability.
Ixia’s IxLoad is the industry’s most scalable and integrated solution for converged multiplay service delivery testing.
It is an ideal solution for assessing the performance of application-aware DPI-capable devices.
IxLoad enables application performance testing using:
• Realistic stateful emulation of application services.
• Application replay to record and replay stateful transactions to test devices that handle emerging and proprietary protocols.
• QoE detective for granular instant insight into per-user, per-IP, and per-VLAN issues.
BreakingPoint and IxNetwork solutions also complement IxLoad’s functionality. IxNetwork provides wire-rate traffic generation with service modeling that builds realistic, dynamically controllable data plane traffic. It also offers the industry’s best test solution for functional and performance testing by using comprehensive emulation for routing, switching, MPLS, IP multicast, broadband, authentication, Carrier Ethernet, and data center bridging (DCB) protocols.
BreakingPoint enables the creation of realworld legitimate traffic with full control of the load capacity and detailed per-simulated host reporting. And it offers robust common internet file system (CIFS) and web application testing capabilities for WAN acceleration.
