Welcome to another January, 2010 issue of GL Communications’ newsletter providing information on the latest product enhancements. Our PacketCheck™ - product has been enhanced to support multistream generation and reception, PRBS pattern generation and reception, RTD (round trip delay) measurement, impairment generation, loopback at all levels, including Ethernet frames and IP/UDP packets, and a simple to use GUI interface. Its features compare favorably with other test sets costing significantly more.

Overview

GL's enhanced PacketCheck™ is a PC based Ethernet / IP BERT and throughput test tool that is very easy to use. It truly takes confusion out of Ethernet and IP testing at all protocol layers - from raw Ethernet frames to IP/UDP packets. It can be used as a general purpose network performance analysis tool for 10Mbps, 100Mbps and 1Gbps LANs and WANs.

Here are some simple applications:

• What is the maximum IP bandwidth between your branch offices? Find out with PacketCheck™
  
  
• What is the Round Trip Delay (RTD) between two IP address locations with microsecond accuracy? Between two Ethernet MAC addresses? Use PacketCheck™ to find it out
  
  
• Is your LAN Data Switch dropping packets? Introducing errors? Blocking traffic because it's overloaded? Why not test it with PacketCheck™?
  
  
• Is some of your CAT 5 or CAT 6 wiring deteriorating? Introducing errors? Test it with PacketCheck™
  
  
• Need to find out your bandwidth between enterprise locations? The throughput? Error rates? Delay? Use PacketCheck™

PacketCheck™ makes use of the PC's network interface card (NIC) to transmit and receive Ethernet or IP packets over the network. Throughputs up to 800 Mbps can be easily tested.

PacketCheck™ generates multi stream Ethernet/IP/UDP traffic and measures end to end performance such as Byte Error Rate, Total Packets, Packet loss, Out of Sequence Packets, and Errorred Packets.

Important Enhancements Introduced:

• Multistream Generation

  PacketCheck™ has now been enhanced to generate multi stream traffic. Each stream can be configured independently and can have different attributes like direction (Tx, Rx, or Tx and Rx), bandwidth, frame size, Layer (Ethernet/IP/UDP) . On the receiving side, performance measurements like Byte Error Rate, Packet loss are calculated and reported for each stream separately.

• PRBS Pattern Generation / Reception

  PacketCheck™ can now generate PRBS patterns e.g. QRSS, 2ˆ6-1, 2ˆ9-1, 2ˆ11-1, 2ˆ15-1, 2ˆ20-1, and 2ˆ23-1. PacketCheck™ measures and reports the Byte Error Rate, Error Status and the Sync Loss Count based on the PRBS reception.

• Loopback Mode

  PacketCheck™ in addition to the existing Tx (Transmit only), and Rx (Receive only) and Tx_Rx (Transmit and Receive) modes, can now operate in Loopback mode. PacketCheck™ can perform loopback at the Ethernet, IP and UDP levels.

• Calculation of Round Trip Delay (RTD)

  PacketCheck™ now calculates the average Round Trip Delay. Round Trip Delay is the total time taken for a packet to travel to the remote end and back to the point of beginning. Round Trip Delay can be calculated using 2 PacketCheck™ applications - one at the local end running in Tx_Rx (Transmit and Receive) mode and another at the remote end running in Loopback mode. Round Trip Delay is reported in microseconds.

• Run Time Impairment Generation

  PacketCheck™ can generate various Byte level impairments at run time. Each stream can be configured to generate impairments such as Insert/Delete bytes, Change bytes etc.

Other features include:

• Test Ethernet traffic of up to 800Mbps bandwidth
  
  
• Generates full duplex IP, UDP, or Ethernet frame traffic to transmit and/or receive traffic on any of the three layers (Data Link / Network / Transport) with on-demand bandwidth
  
  
• Monitor Performance Statistics (Throughput, Packet loss, Out of order packets)
  
  
• Jumbo frames are supported, in addition to all normal frame sizes from 64 bytes to 1518 bytes
  
  
• User defined test pattern of up to 24 bytes
  
  
• Customizable protocol headers like MAC Source/Destination address, Length/Type field, IP Source/destination address, and UDP Source/Destination Port

For comprehensive information on the application, please visit PacketCheck™ web page.

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