RFC 2544 Network Testing

Features

• Throughput, back-to-back, latency and frame loss testing supporting uni-directional and bi-directional traffic between ports
• Supports RFC 2544 on Electrical/Optical (1000Mbps) ports and Optical only (10G) ports
• Support for frame lengths from 64 bytes to Jumbo frames (up to 16000 bytes)
• Includes various parameter configurations such as Test Selection, Frame Sizes selection, Unidirectional/Bidirectional, Number of trials, Trial Duration, and many more.
• User-defined options to configure various packet header parameters, like MAC addresses, IP addresses, UDP ports, VLAN ID, MPLS Labels, and more.
• Results are displayed in both tabular as well as graphical format.
• Console based CLI (C# and Python client) with additional CXE100 licenses provides the capability of remote operation, and automation

RFC 2544 Test Configurations

PacketExpert™ supports Throughput, Latency, Frame Loss and Back-to-Back tests as specified in RFC 2544. RFC 2544 can be done over Framed Ethernet (Layer2), Stacked VLAN (Q-in-Q), Stacked MPLS, IP or UDP.
RFC 2544 allows the test frame to be configured with Stacked VLAN and Stacked MPLS. This way, end to end RFC 2544 test can be conducted across a Carrier Ethernet/MPLS network.

PacketExpert™ 10GX RFC 2544 Testing

Global configuration option includes parameter settings that are common to all the 4 tests - Throughput, Latency, Back-to-Back, Frame Loss. This application supports frame lengths from 64 bytes to Jumbo frames (up to 16000 bytes). Due to addition of stacked VLAN and stacked MPLS, the minimum length required for frame can come up to be > 64, anything lesser, traffic may not be sent at all. So, this display is provided to help user to configure the correct frame length. It includes an option to configure with the minimum frame length required. Also, any Frame Size configured less than the minimum frame length will be rejected. RFC 2544 recommends 20 different frame sizes for Ethernet.

Global Configuration(Dual Port)

Each RFC 2544 test configuration includes various parameter such as Test Selection, Frame Sizes, Unidirectional/Bidirectional, Number of trials, Trial Duration, and many more. It also provides user-defined options to configure various packet header parameters, like MAC addresses, IP addresses, UDP ports, VLAN ID, MPLS Labels, and others.

Throughput, Latency, Frame loss, Back-to-Back Test Configuration

RFC 2544 Test Results

Results are displayed in both tabular as well as graph format.

• Status - displays test status such as In Progress, Completed, and Aborted. In addition, it displays status of learning frames and test frames for the current trial along with Bandwidth, Frame Size, and Frame Count.
• Throughput - Throughput results are displayed in terms of bandwidth (both in percentage as well as Mbps) for each frame size. Graphically, it is plotted as throughput vs frame size.
• Latency - Latency values are displayed in terms of microseconds for each frame size. Graphically, the latency value is plotted against frame size.
• Back-to-Back - Back-to-Back values are displayed in terms of the burst size (in milliseconds) for each frame size. Graphically, the burst size is plotted against frame size.
• Frame Loss - Frame Loss results are displayed in terms of the throughput (in percentage) measured over the range of input rates (in percentage) for each frame size. Graphically, for each frame size, the throughput is plotted against the test rate. For multiple frame sizes, there will be multiple line graphs.

RFC 2544 Throughput Test Results

RFC 2544 Latency Test Results

Report Generation

RFC 2544 application supports reports generation in PDF and CSV file formats detailing the configuration and results of the previously run test.

The PDF report file generated includes all the details such as the Test configuration, Test results, Interface configuration etc. For RFC 2544, results are saved in tabular as well as graphical format, just as in the GUI. The CSV report file generated includes only the Results and the Statistics parameters for the test conducted.

RFC2544 PDF Report File

RFC2544 CSV Report File