Triple-Play
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Trends
Triple-Play combines high-speed Internet data services, Internet telephony and video streaming over broadband access networks: Data, voice and video applications on one pipe. Multi-Play goes further, allowing Service Providers and thier network equipment vendors to differentiate themselves by adding innovative services such as Gaming, interactive TV and messaging.
The rush to offer multi-play services has spawned development of innovative devices that can categorize, filter, prioritize and forward application-layer traffic -- devices such as application-aware firewalls, service routers, content delivery systems and layer-7 traffic management solutions.
Unfortunately, hackers have been busy, too. New threats are emerging from DoS attacks that target SIP and RTP ports, and Trojans that can duplicate VoIP packet flows, allowing hackers to eavesdrop on your customers' Internet telephony conversations.
New Test Challenges
Recent Worm attacks have been unkind to some network operators who may have chosen inadequately tested network equipment or may regret a lack of performance verification during network design and capacity planning. The resulting congestion and DoS attacks caused network outages that favored some firewall / router device vendors (or device configurations) over others. There is a renewed emphasis by both vendors and network operators on realistic testing, using a real-world mix of traffic from multiple applications.
In the real world, multi-play systems must perform under a variety of conditions.
- Quality of Experience - Performance Benchmarking seeks to characterize the ultimate performance of a device or system, while measuring degradation in the Quality of Experience (QoE), as determined by the application -- voice, video or data.
- Robustness - Denial of Service attacks can criple the performance of a single device, such as a firewall, creating an instant bottleneck. It is important to measure the impact of attacks on scalability and performance, as defined by the application, and to verify system robustness both at and beyond the system's limits.
- Fairness and Prioritization - P2P applications, such as BitTorrent and Kazaa, now dominate the Internet. Many network operators are seeking to traffic-manage, rate-limit, or even block P2P applications. It is vital to measure the impact of both wanted and unwanted applications on the performance of real-time and business applications that are critical to customers.
- Network Addressing - IPv6 and Network Address Translation are solving IPv4 address limitations in very different ways. Both IPv6 and NAT can reduce the performance of real-time applications, or introduce instability if they are untested with realistic application traffic.
- Scalability - Network operators don't like to provision any more capacity than they need to. Faster devices, multiple devices, equipment upgrades... capacity costs money. Scalability testing is the single most effective way to reduce costs during network design, forward network planning and capacity estimation. Scalability testing allows you to select and purchase the right network equipment that will be sufficient for tomorrow's needs without blowing your budget.
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NetworkTester – An Integrated Solution
By taking an integrated approach to testing, the Agilent NetworkTester accelerates the development or deployment of your next-generation Multi-Play devices, systems, services and network security equipment.
- Triple-Play - NetworkTester is the first application test solution to offer high-speed data, VoIP and video testing on a single port, within a single test system. Emulate thousands of real users, change the traffic application mix, and measure the impact of data applications on voice and video performance.
- Multi-Play - NetworkTester allows you to add other multi-play applications, such as Instant Messaging, to complete the Multi-Play application mix. Emulate realistic mixes of application traffic to characterize system performance limits and Quality of Experience under expected loads.
- Proprietary Applications - Proprietary protocols such as network games and P2P applications can be simulated and scaled using NetworkTester's superior bi-directional, stateful Capture/Replay capability. Multiple sessions can be simulated on many different addresses to multiply application clients and servers. Simulate many users playing games, sharing files and using common messaging services. With P2P traffic now dominating the Internet, NetworkTester's proprietary protocol capabilities enable you to quantify the effectiveness of the latest Application Traffic Management methods such as P2P rate limiting, layer-7 "deep packet" classification and tagging, and application prioritization. For example, you can measure the real-time performance impact of application-aware firewalls that can recognize and filter undesirable traffic.
- Denial of Service Attacks - A triple-play or multi-play system is not complete until it is performance-tested while subjected to attack traffic. With NetworkTester, you can add DoS attacks, spam and virus attachments to your application traffic mix. Ramp-up attack packet rates while you observe, in real time, the degradation in your system's performance. How rapidly does Quality of Experience degrade? Does VoIP call set-up time suffer, or can your system detect attacks and maintain the priority of real-time traffic? How much headroom do end users need, during Capacity Planning, to allow for malicious traffic? Can your network equipment still meet the performance expectations of your customers, to satisfy SLAs? NetworkTester answers these questions to help you improve intrusion prevention to make you look better than your competitors.
- Access Protocols - Other so-called solutions offer separate test applications for access protocols such as IPsec. This is not an acceptable solution for triple-play performance testing. Only NetworkTester fully integrates VLANs and access protocols such as IPsec, IPsecv6, DHCP, PPPoE and 802.1x into a single NetPressure application, allowing you to easily emulate your voice, video and data applications, including proprietary protocols and attack traffic, over combinations of access protocols, VPN tunnels, VLANs, and IPv4 plus IPv6 address ranges. All at the same time. Just like many real users would.
- Set it up in Minutes - The innovative NetPressure application goes beyond traditional telephony test tools, packet blasters, and legacy client-and-server test systems. It takes only minutes to configure seemingly complex test scenarios involving data, voice, video and attack traffic. On a single port, or on multiple ports. From the same test system. Without writing a single script. And you can correlate all of your client and server measurements to rapidly find and diagnose performance bottlenecks or tune system performance.
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More Information
- Demos
- NetworkTester Triple Play highlights: Click here to view the animation
- Brochures
- Technical Datasheets
- White papers/Technology Primers
- Test Cases
- Register here to receive Triple Play white paper and new Triple Play Journal test cas
- IETF RFC 1889 RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications (RTP/RTCP)
- IETF RFC 2326: Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP)
- IETF RFC 2327 Session Description Protocol (SDP)
- IETF RFC 3261 Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
- IETF RFC 3266 Support for IPv6 in Session Description Protocol (SDP)
- ITU-T H.323: Packet-based multimedia communications systems
- ITU-T H.225: Call signalling protocols and media stream packetization for packet-based multimedia communication systems
- ITU-T H.245: Control protocol for multimedia communication
- ITU-T H.235: Security and encryption for H-Series multimedia terminals
- ITU-T G.711: Pulse code modulation (PCM) of voice frequencies at 56/64 kbps
- ETSI GSM 06.10: ETSI Global System for Mobile Communications
- Press Releases
- Testimonials
- Membership (Non Agilent Link)
Companion Products
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