Test & Measurement

Emulator simulates WAN real world conditions

11th January 2016
Mick Elliott
0

The Multi-Stream IP WAN Emulator referred to as IPNetSim (1 Gbps/10 Gbps) has been announced by GL Communications. IPNetSim emulates an IP network with access to 10Gbps full duplex link or a 10/100/1000 Mbps full duplex link. For each direction, incoming traffic can be identified into separate user defined streams (up to 16 streams for 1Gbps pipe and up to 4 streams for 10Gbps pipe).

These user defined streams can be modified to simulate network impairments.

The IPNetSim comprises of four ports, of which two ports support 10/100/1000 Mbps in either Electrical or Optical mode, emulating a 1Gbps full duplex pipe. The optical mode supports only 1000 Mbps using SFPs enabling testing on optical fiber. The other two ports on the unit support 10 Gbps using 10 Gbps SFP+s.

IPNetSim 1Gbps IPN501 appliance is a 1U rack-mount hardware unit while IPNetSim 1Gbps IPN505 is a portable Touch-screen handheld unit sporting the same features as IPN501.

The functional capabilities of the emulator include: Simulation of WAN conditions and this includes various real world WAN settings such as bandwidth, latency, packet-loss, error insertion, reordering, and duplication to check the performance of end equipment to real world impairments. These settings can be applied for the selected 16 unique streams on 1Gbps link and 4 unique streams on 10Gbps link independently in each direction.

Traffic (bidirectional streams) can be processed at wirespeed (1Gbps or 10Gbps). Bidirectional streams can be configured as symmetrical (identical WAN impairments in both directions) or asymmetrical (different WAN impairments in each direction). WAN impairments can be configured independently for each stream.

By classifying traffic into separate streams, and applying different set of impairments on each stream, a single emulator can emulate different WAN scenarios like Head Office to Data Centre, Head Office to Branch Office etc.

Real-time traffic statistics per stream are displayed. The statistics include Tx and Rx Frames, Dropped Packets (due to Bandwidth Control), Number of Packets with Errors, Dropped Packets (due to Packet Loss), Duplicated Packets, and Reordered Packets. In addition to Stream statistics, detailed per port frame statistics is also provided.

The real-time Throughput of each stream, plotted as rate against time is displayed in the form of line graph. All streams throughput can be viewed together, or user can select or deselect each stream to view. Graphing is supported from 5 seconds up to 7 days.

Product Spotlight

Upcoming Events

View all events
Newsletter
Latest global electronics news
© Copyright 2024 Electronic Specifier