Ixia introduced a testing toolset designed to accurately verify performance and scalability of triple play services including the transport data and control planes, the content servers delivering these services, and the subscriber edge, where realistic emulation of hundreds of thousands of subscribers is essential to accurately derive real-world performance metrics.
Ixia said its solution can be used to test the full range of Triple Play signaling and data protocols in any combination, including when under denial of service attack. Signaling protocols include IGMP, MLD, SIP, MGCP and RTSP. Streaming protocols include RTP and UDP multicast and unicast. The Ixia video solutions can emulate MPEG2, MPEG4, Media9, and other codecs in both high definition and standard definition formats. Signaling and data traffic may be run over multiple interfaces including GigE, 10GigE, and ATM.
The Ixia Triple Play toolset provides specific capabilities for subscriber edge testing that both traditional edge network equipment manufacturers and their carrier customers are utilizing. Key test metrics include subscriber scalability (PPP), video channel change latency (IGMP/MLD join/leave), IP address management (DHCP scalability), QoS policy marking, authentication scalability, and VoIP signaling scalability. Targeted Ixia solutions for executing such testing include IxExplorer, Ixia's flagship traffic generation interface for IGMP emulation and DHCPv4 & v6 server testing; IxRouter for multicast routing emulation; IxLoad for PPP & IGMP join/leave validation; IxScriptMate for automated multicast testing; as well as a range of customized test scripts from Ixia's Custom Engineering team, such as:
- DHCP server test scripts that stress edge routers by transmitting a large number of subscribers requesting IP addresses at the same time, simulating an access device coming back online
- Home Gateway testers, which simulate a large number of subscribers "channel surfing"
- Join/Leave test scripts for measuring the join & leave latency and also the received data rates, latency, latency distribution, sequence errors, etc.
