VoIP Testing
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Trends
Voice over IP (VoIP) promises the benefits of lower cost and the creation of new applications that integrate telephony into business systems. Manufacturers and service providers are racing to develop and deploy VoIP products and services, while standards bodies are refining international recommendations – such as H.323 and SIP – to increase the security, interoperability and performance of VoIP services. Unfortunately, hackers are already writing DoS attacks that exploit weaknesses in VoIP systems, and both service providers and enterprises are finding that firewalls can degrade VoIP performance.
New Test Challenges
Devices such as NAT firewalls, VPN concentrators, VoIP proxies and integrated gateways need to allow valid VoIP traffic to pass through while simultaneously blocking DoS attacks on the network. Many of these devices must prioritize voice traffic over traffic from other applications (such as web, email and instant messaging) to ensure voice quality.
- Network Address Translation (NAT) creates security, performance and interworking problems for VoIP. Manufacturers and industry forums are creating several standard and many proprietary approaches for “NAT traversal” that enable VoIP calls to penetrate firewalls and security gateways without compromising security. These approaches include UPnP, STUN, TURN, ALG, tunneling, and extensions to the SIP and H.323 protocols. Many of these methods can have a large impact on performance.
- IPsec encryption may prevent firewalls, VoIP proxies and Application Gateways (ALGs) from inspecting VoIP packets and translating addresses and port numbers.
- Denial of Service attacks can target the same addresses and port numbers used by VoIP devices and applications. Firewalls and security gateways can mitigate DoS attacks – it is important to measure the impact of DoS attacks on VoIP performance.
- Data services such as HTTP, P2P, instant messaging and email can create network congestion, degrading VoIP performance. A more subtle effect of data traffic is its degradation of VoIP performance through firewalls, firewall routers and other layer 4-7 devices. It is important to measure the impact of data services on VoIP, and ensure that network equipment is capable of prioritizing VoIP traffic and meeting QoS requirements
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NetworkTester – An Integrated Solution
By taking an integrated approach to testing, the Agilent NetworkTester accelerates your development or deployment of next-generation devices and networks.
The NetPressure application covers all your network security and content networking test needs:
- Emulate both H.323 and SIP calls (including both signaling and data) on a single port for realistic system testing.
- Mix stateful VoIP and data application traffic on a single port to verify prioritization and ensure VoIP QoS.
- Introduce DoS attacks and measure the impact on VoIP performance.
- Scale VoIP traffic to emulate tens of thousands of calls per second and simultaneous calls to determine the performance limits of your system.
- Measure real performance using stateful traffic, from a mix of applications, over both IPv6 and IPv4.
- Support for IPsec and and IPsecv6 are seamlessly integrated into the powerful Test Plan environment. Test VPN devices and simulate encrypted VoIP traffic.
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Companion Products
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More Information
- Technical Datasheets
- Brochures
- White papers/Technology Primers
- Test Cases
- Press Releases
- Independent Industry Test Plans
In Nov 2004, Agilent's NetworkTester measured VoIP and VoIPv6 performance and the impact of data applications (such as HTTP) on SIP and H.323 voice application traffic with leading network security vendors at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Labs (UNH-IOL).
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Test FIR.5.5: Voice and Data Application Traffic
- Relevant Standards (Non Agilent Links)
- IETF RFC 3261 Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
- 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
- Membership (Non Agilent Link)
- Related News
- Events and Seminars
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