Spirent Launches Powerful Solution For Testing Application-Aware Mobile Networks And Security

Spirent will be demonstrating Studio’s integration with Landslide at booth # 4810 at this year’s International CTIA Wireless conference and tradeshow in New Orleans, May 8-10, 2012.

The integration combines Spirent Landslide’s ability to emulate all elements of the mobile network with Studio’s ability to accurately recreate application traffic and attacks. Mobile operators and equipment vendors now have a single test platform to validate mobility, data throughput, application awareness and security at scale. The combined solution enables the creation of advanced call models with device specific signaling and application traffic. The solution also tests mobile security by generating attacks from within the network along with high-scale mobility and traffic.

“Today’s mobile networks integrate application-aware networks to help create new revenue-generating services and further secure the network. However, until today there was no single platform that could test both the scalability of these mobile networks and the effectiveness of the granular policies governed by this ‘app-aware’ infrastructure,” said Jeff Schmitz, vice president, Networks & Applications group at Spirent. “Now, less than three weeks after our acquisition of Mu Dynamics, we have already been able to integrate the thousands of application profiles and security attacks with the Spirent Landslide platform, giving our customers the best of both worlds.”

Without the ability to quickly and accurately test the policies governing their networks, mobile operators risk poor performance. Similarly, security breaches and attacks can bring down networks, leading to loss of sensitive data and ultimately resulting in customer churn. As a result, mobile operators have deployed app-aware infrastructure to help detect and classify applications for a number of purposes including network performance, lawful intercept and traffic shaping across the network. However, testing these capabilities while emulating millions of mobile users is a significant challenge. The combination of Spirent Landslide and Studio enables testing of an application-aware mobile network supporting millions of subscribers while providing real-time application identification for billing, policy, security, and performance management.