A classic test setup is illustrated in Fig.
This methodology has become the de facto test performed routinely in quality assurance and verification labs to quantify the performance of network devices. RFC 2533 defines the “Benchmarking Methodology for Network Interconnect Devices” and was originally designed to allow the standardized testing and benchmarking of a single interconnect device such as a router or a switch, known as the device under test (DUT). RFC 2544 was published in 1999 by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and serves as the main standards organization for the Internet. For corporate customers who require services with specific performance objectives, it is common to employ the RFC 2544 tests. In addition, tests such as loading a web page using HTTP or downloading a file using FTP are often performed to verify Internet connectivity.īasic connectivity testing is adequate for residential Internet access, which has no implicit performance guarantees.
These tests are also commonly used to troubleshoot an Ethernet network. trace-route tests trace the IP traffic from its origin to the destination, showing how many hops it requires to reach the destination and how long each hop takes, and confirming that IP traffic is taking the desired route.a PING test sends a packet to the specified address and waits for a reply to determine whether a specific IP address is accessible.DHCP also supports a mix of static and dynamic IP addresses In some systems, the device’s IP address can even change while it is still connected. With dynamic addressing, a device can have a different IP address every time it connects to the network. a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) test verifies that the customer premises equipment (CPE) can obtain a valid IP address.a link check confirms that a link is active and can successfully negotiate a speed and duplex setting.Whether a new or existing customer orders a new circuit, field technicians must perform basic connectivity and service verification tests to ensure that the circuit is operational before it is turned up. Test equipment portability becomes a requirement and has driven the near replacement of all chassis-based test sets with new, affordable handheld devices.īasic connectivity testing and service verification This requires field technicians to accurately and efficiently conduct basic connectivity testing and service verification tests as well as performance testing and QoS testing. Today, carriers and service providers face tremendous competitive pressures and are driven to provision circuits with unprecedented speed and cost-efficiencies while still ensuring that service meets or exceeds the service-level agreement (SLA). Subscribers with different bandwidth profiles are provided with different levels of service.
Any traffic sent beyond the excess rate is discarded. Service frames up to the committed rate are considered in-profile and delivered per the performance objectives frames sent up to the excess rate are allowed into the provider’s network but considered out-of-profile and delivered without service performance objectives. Each traffic profile consists of committed information rate, committed burst size, excess information rate, and excess information size. It specifies the average rate of “committed” and “excess” traffic that a subscriber can generate into the provider’s network and the associated performance objectives in terms of the delay, frame loss, and availability. The Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) uses the concept of a bandwidth profile to describe the subscriber’s traffic. Concurrently, Ethernet has matured to support quality-of-service (QoS) parameters across multimedia traffic in a converged network.