Mulitport Ethernet switch testing simplified

Jagdish Vadalia, Senior Manager for Product Development said: “High density Gigabit Ethernet Network Switches can have 12 or 24 ports, each supporting full bidirectional 1Gb/s traffic rate, totalling to 24 or 48Gbps rate simultaneously on all ports. To test such switches requires test equipment that is capable of generating traffic at the rate (24 or 48Gbps) and analyse the traffic returned from the switch for errors.”

He added: “GL's High-Density versatile test equipment referred to as HD-PacketExpert facilitates the testing of Multiport Ethernet Switches with ease and accuracy. The Important test procedures are BERT, RFC 2544, Y.1564, and Multi stream UDP and TCP traffic generation and analysis.”

Mr. Vadalia further explained: “GL’s HD-PacketExpert helps Testing Multiport Switches in 3 Stages: To begin with Basic Bit Error Rate Testing (BERT) ,in this, Layer2/Layer3/Layer4 frames containing BERT payload of various frame sizes are sent at full line rate to each and every port of the switch. The forwarded traffic from the switch is received by HD-PacketExpert and analysed for Bit Errors, Pattern Sync. BERT testing represents a basic first level testing, making sure that the switch can handle full line rate on all the ports without dropping or corrupting even a single bit. HD-PacketExpert supports BERT on all 12 or 24 ports.”

He added: “Once the BERT process of the switches accomplished, next stage involves the testing of Throughput, Latency (Delay), Packet Loss (at different rates), and also ability to handle bursty traffic. RFC 2544 testing helps in testing and measuring the aforementioned test parameters. HD-PacketExpert supports RFC 2544 testing on 3 or 6 'Port Pairs' simultaneously i.e. RFC 2544 tests are conducted using Port Pairs. The ability of the switch to handle multi stream traffic simultaneously is an important feature to be tested. When packets with multiple MAC addresses, VLAN tags, and IP addresses hit the same port, the switch has to process these packets and forward them correctly without introducing any impairment. HD-PacketExpert supports multi stream traffic generation on 3 or 6 ports simultaneously (up to 16 streams per port), at full line rate. Each port can generate a mix of Layer2/Layer3 streams with different MAC/IP addresses and VLAN tags. Using a remote loopback, the traffic is routed back to HD-PacketExpert and analysed for Throughput, Delay, Packet Loss and Packet jitter per stream. HD-PacketExpert also supports Y.1564 based Ethernet Service Activation testing and multi stream TCP testing.”

Other Features

• User-friendly GUI to get started quickly
• C# .NET APIs for automation. Eg: for integration with Lab view
• Command Line Interface (CLI) to access all the functionalities remotely such as using Tool Command Language (TCL) and MAPS CLI Client/Server architecture
• Real time results presented per Port and all-Port basis in both tabular as well as graphical formats
• Detailed test result reports for each of the simultaneous tests in PDF and CSV file formats