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Library: Test Plans

RIP Testing

RIP Testing

This test plan was created for testing RIP (Routing Information Protocol) and is designed to help Network and QA Test Engineers properly verify Device Under Test (DUT) conformance to standards, as well as its performance characteristics and scalability.

  1. RIP v1/v2/ng Conformance Test
  2. RIP v1/v2/ng Capacity Test
  3. RIP v1/v2/ng Equal Cost Load Balancing Test
  4. RIP v1/v2/ng Summary Address Test


 1. RIP v1/v2/ng Conformance Test

Objective

The purpose of this test is to verify the DUT's compliance with the following capabilities defined within the various RIP RFC's:

RFC 1058 - RIP Version 1 [support for IPV4]
RFC 1723 - RIP Version 2 [support for IPV4]
RFC 2453 - RIP Version 2 [support for IPV4]
RFC 2082 - RIP Version 2 MD5 Authentication [support for IPV4 / IPV6]
RFC 2080 - RIPng (next generation) [support for IPV6]


This test will monitor the DUT's ability to respond, negotiate, authenticate, learn, and drop routing entries as required by the above mentioned RFC's. These tests can be performed with Ixia's IxANVL conformance test solution. The testing will provide the Network and QA Engineers with Pass/Fail information to validate the DUT's compliance levels as determined by a neutral "Third Party." IxANVL provides detailed information about failures for diagnosis, debugging, and hex dump of the explicit protocol infractions.

The testing done is very valuable in that the information obtained during the testing can help guide key network decisions, purchases, and most importantly, network design considerations prior to deployment.

Setup

This test requires a minimum of a one to a maximum of three network connections between the test tool and the DUT. The test topologies will change during the testing of the DUT's conformance. The Network/Test Engineer will need to reconfigure the DUT between topological changes to allow for test sequencing to continue.



Figure 1. RIP Conformance Test Setup


Input Parameters

The following table outlines the basic input parameters required for configuring this conformance test.

Parameter Description
DUT Configuration
  • RIP Version Assignments
  • Router IPv4 or IPv6 Assignments
  • Timer Settings
  • Route Summarization Settings
  • Route Propagation Settings
    		•
    Test Tool Configuration
  • Tester IPv4 or IPv6 Assignments
  • Gateway Address (points to DUT)
  • RIP Version Assignments
  • RIP Protocol Parameters
  • RIP Route Ranges
    		•
    Table 1. RIP Conformance Test Setup

    Methodology

    1. Enter Parameters for both Conformance Tester and the DUT.
    2. Select all tests or a subset of tests to run against the DUT as shown below in Figure 2. Additionally, the classification settings can be changed to Must, Should, and May in the event that customization is required.

      Note: Generally, it is a good idea to run a single test against the DUT first to ensure all physical connections and IP addressing, protocols, etc. are correctly configured.



      Figure 2. RIP Test Case Selection


    3. Select the Scripts for Configuration and Parameters to enable automatic configuration of the DUT.
    4. Start the selected Conformance tests against the DUT using the GUI or in a batch mode via command scripts.


    Results

    This section will help define how to decode both a PASS test as well as a FAIL test. In addition, the conformance tester should show a complete report summary for quick analysis of RIP Test Suite status.



    Figure 3. RIP Test Case Results


    This snapshot shows an Excel-type spreadsheet, which shows all tests run through completion, the Case name, the Case Status, the start time, the elapsed time, and finally the Case Comments for each test.



    Figure 4. RIP Test Case - PASSED


    The test above shows that the DUT Sent and Received on the correct port 520, and therefore PASSED.



    Figure 5. RIP Test Case - FAIL


    The FAILED test in Figure 5 above was actually a NEGATIVE test where the intention was for the DUT not accept the 26th route within the update message. However, this DUT accepted this information and therefore FAILED this part of the test.

    2. RIP v1/v2/ng Route Capacity Test

    Objective

    The purpose of this scalability test is to verify the number of routes that a RIP DUT can sustain at a single time. This test is designed to help Network and Test Engineers to:

  • Evaluate devices to be purchased or used in their own networks
  • Test capacity and understand the network limitations before actual deployments of new network elements

    Setup

    The Route Capacity Test requires two tester ports - one to send traffic/routing information and one to receive traffic/routing information. Test port 2 is used to send traffic and is unidirectional. Test port 1 is used to inject RIP routes into the DUT. During the test, port 1 will gradually increase the number of advertised routes until the maximum sustainable route capacity has been reached. IxRouter can be used to execute this test by injecting RIP routes into the DUT, generating traffic to these routes to verify proper population in the DUT's routing table, and subsequently calculating maximum route capacity.



    Figure 6. RIP Route Capacity Test Topology


    Test setup requires physically connecting the DUT to the test device, configuration of the DUT, configuration of the Ixia Chassis, and finally identifying the number of required Routers and Route Ranges for the capacity testing.

    Remember that additional Ixia test suites, such as IxChariot, can be used in conjunction with the IxRouter and IxExplorer for the end user traffic instead of using the traffic stream generation within the IxExplorer.

    Input Parameters

    Parameter Description
    Max Rate Rate at which frames will be sent to the advertised routes
    Tolerance Percentage of traffic loss tolerance
    Route Step Number of routes to increase per iteration
    Number of Routes The number of prefixes to generate at the beginning of the test
    Advertise Delay Per Route The maximum time in seconds the router is allowed to absorb the advertised routes. This number is multiplied by the number of routes to calculate the "Max Wait Time"


    Table 2. RIP Route Capacity Test DUT Parameters

    Methodology
    1. Test port 2 advertises the initial number of routes defined by the parameter "Number of Routes."
    2. After passing the Max Wait Time, determined by .Advertised Delay Per Route, test port 1 sends traffic targeting each advertised route behind port 2. The traffic throughput rate is set by the parameter "Max Rate."
    3. Test port 2 verifies packets received within the defined loss "Tolerance."
    4. Test port 2 advertises more routes increased by the amount defined by "Route Step."
    5. Repeat step 2 through step 4 until port 2 receives no packets or packet loss is above the "Tolerance" level.
    Results

    When the test completes and the tolerance has been exceeded, the test results will show the maximum number of routes learned by the DUT and should also begin to show some packet loss since traffic is not reaching the identified routes.

    Figure 7 shows and example of traffic loss at about 6 seconds when the DUT hits maximum route capacity. On the graph below, notice that traffic starts to drop off when roughly 200 Receive Frames/second are lost. Once the route capacity is scaled back to about 100 routes, traffic is restored at about 7 seconds into the test. As the rate is then slowly increased in smaller increments, packet loss is experienced again. In this way, this test validates the DUT's maximum RIP Route Capacity. For this test, the capacity was roughly 4500 routes before the DUT started to drop traffic.



    Figure 7. RIP Route Capacity Traffic Loss Diagram


    Name 10.200.134.27:01.01 10.200.134.27:01.02
    Link State Link Up Link Up
    Line Speed 10 Mbps 10 Mbps
    Duplex Mode Half Half
    Frames Sent 4910286 5771200
    Frames Sent Rate 1488 1488
    Valid Frames Received 5010800 1560047
    Valid Frames Received Rate 1400 1400
    Bytes Sent 420735110 387892338
    Bytes Sent Rate 95229 95213
    Bytes Received 324350769 99940908
    Bytes Received Rate 95245 85845


    Figure 8. RIP Route Capacity Traffic Loss Information


    3. RIP v1/v2/ng Equal Cost Load Balancing Test

    Objective

    The purpose of this test is to verify DUT operation when there are multiple paths to a single destination network. The Equal Cost Multi-path design is supported across several routing protocols like RIP, RIPv2, RIPng, OSPF and BGP.

    Load Balancing - when a router learns a route on multiple interfaces to the same destination network, the router will assign the lowest administrative distance in the routing table. Routers can sometimes support multiple methods for load balancing traffic across the multi-path routes. For instance, some DUT's can support per-packet and/or per-destination-based load balancing.

    Per-destination load balancing allows the router to look at the destination of the traffic and then map this traffic to a particular interface. Note: the assumption here is that there are at least two paths to the same destination network. In this case, the router gets traffic for Host-1 and it maps traffic across the first interface; then the router gets traffic for Host-2 and will map traffic to second interface. This is a good way to load balance destination traffic, but there are some limitations with this method's in that if one of the two destinations mentioned above was a server, then one of the links could theoretically be saturated.

    A better way to manage traffic for this test is to use per-packet load balancing, which allows the router to dynamically balance each and every packet across the multi-path routes. For a server connection, this methodology evenly distributes the traffic across all interfaces and does not statically map it to any particular interface.

    Note: There are some caveats with doing per-packet modes on certain devices that need to be considered when doing this type of load balancing.

    Default Administrative Distances
    Connected Interface 0
    Static 1
    eBGP 20
    EIGRP (Internal) 90
    IGRP 100
    OSPF 110
    IS-IS 115
    RIP 120
    EIGRP (External) 170
    iBGP 200
    EIGRP Route Summary 5


    Table 3 RIP Administrative Distance Table

    Setup

    This test requires three ports to be connected to the DUT. Test Port-1 will be used to send traffic across the duplicate routes to the destination network. Test Port-2 and Test Port-3 are used to receive traffic and propagate ownership of the source network to the DUT on two different ports respectively.



    Figure 9. RIP Equal Cost


    Test setup requires physically connecting the DUT to the test device as shown in Figure 9, configuration of the DUT, configuration of the Router Tester Device, and finally identifying the number of required Routers and Route Ranges required for the capacity testing.

    Input Parameters

    The input parameter table below defines the variables that are tested in this section.

    Parameter Description
    RIP Version Select single version or possibly configure an interface to send/receive multiple versions.
    RIP Send Type Define Broadcast-V1, Broadcast-V2 or Multicast
    RIP Receive Type Define Broadcast-V1, Broadcast-V2 or Multicast
    RIP Load Balancing Type Per-Packet or Per-Destination selection


    Table 4. RIP Test Input Parameters

    Methodology
    1. Configure three test ports - one to send traffic and the other two to emulate the same cost routes to the destination network.
    2. The RIP ports advertise routes for the same destination network.
    3. The router then adds the same cost routes to the routing table local which in turn equates to an equal cost route on two different links.
    4. Verify the RIP peers and neighbors are connected and forwarding, check the DUT's routing table to ensure the equal cost routes are shown and that this is a supported feature on the DUT.
    5. Once route verification is successful, start traffic across the learned routes and determine whether the DUT is configured for per-packet or per-destination based balancing.
    6. Once either of the above is tested, repeat steps again for forwarding method not yet tested.


    Results

    The testing should show the DUT's ability to support Per-Destination and Per-Packet modes of Load Balancing across Multiple interfaces for routes to a single destination network.

    The table below shows the DUT results for the test "Per-Destination" mode where the DUT was given traffic to Host-1 and Host-2 on a respective destination network, where traffic is sent to Host-1 (10.0.3.100 / 24) and Host-2. The DUT handles this traffic correctly as shown below where 500 Frames were sent (250 Host-1 + 250 Host-2), and the router sent the traffic for Host-1 over interface 1 and the traffic for Host-2 over interface 2.

    Port Tester Port-1 Tester Port 2 / Host-1 Tester Port-3 / Host-2
    Frames Sent Rate 500 0 0
    Frames Receive Rate 0 250 250


    Figure 10. RIP Per-Destination Traffic (even)


    The table below shows the DUT results for the test "Per-Destination" mode where the DUT was given traffic to Host-1 and Host-2 at different frame rates.
    • Host-1 frame rate = 250
    • Host-2 frame rate = 500
    The DUT handles this traffic correctly; however, if this were a Wide Area Network connection, this traffic could saturate the single link.

    Port Tester Port-1 Tester Port 2 Tester Port-3
    Frames Sent Rate 750 0 0
    Frames Receive Rate 0 250 500


    Figure 11. RIP Per-Destination Traffic (un-even)


    The table below shows the DUT results for the test "Per-Packet" mode where the DUT was given the uneven traffic from the previous test. Here the DUT handles this traffic after some simple DUT reconfiguration to force Per-Packet mode. The traffic is then correctly distributed across interfaces 2/0 and 2/1 evenly.

    Port Tester Port-1 Tester Port 2 Tester Port-3
    Frames Sent Rate 750 0 0
    Frames Receive Rate 0 375 375


    Figure 12. RIP Per-Packet Traffic (un-even)


    4. RIP v2/ng IP Summary Address Test

    Objective

    The purpose of this test is to verify DUT operation when performing Summary Addressing within RIPv2/ng. The DUT needs to advertise the summarized local IP address pool on a network so that the IP addresses can be used for VPN or PPP connections where the mask would be /32. Generally, this adds more routes to the network updates than required and is therefore summarized with the Auto-Summary feature. By implementing this feature, routing neighbors will only see a class c host explicit network as a single class c route as shown below.

    Normally, if we had a PPP connection where a 10.0.0.0 / 24 were used, and assume that we have 254 hosts connected, the routing table local would show explicit host routes for all 254 connections, which in turn would then require that 254 routes be added to all neighbors routing tables on the network.

    The Auto-Summary feature will now send only a single update for all 254 hosts to its neighboring routers. This then prevents several broadcast packets for V1 routers from traversing the network.

    Some caveats with IP Address Auto-Summary:
    • There is a requirement to disable split-horizon on this interface to run the Auto-Summary
    • For the summary route to be propagated, there must be at least one child route/ppp client connected
    • Generally, summarize routes in RIP database get processed first
    Setup

    The IP Summary Addressing test requires two tester ports - one to send or inject the emulated PPP host explicit routes to the DUT, and the second port to verify the DUT ability to consolidate the routes using IP Summary feature.



    Figure 13. RIP IP Summary Address Test Setup


    Input Parameters

    The variable input parameters used in this test are quite simple since the intention is only to emulate a group of PPP connected users into the DUT. To do this, first a simple Class C network is created with a number of host explicit routes (/32).

    Parameter Description
    DUT Configuration
  • RIP Version Assignments
  • Router IPv4 or IPv6 Assignments
  • Route Summarization Settings
  • Route Propagation Settings
    		•
    Test Tool Configuration/td>
  • Tester IPv4 or IPv6 Assignments
  • Gateway Address (points to DUT)
  • RIP Version Assignments
  • RIP Protocol Parameters
  • RIP Route Ranges
    		•


    Table 5. RIP IP Summary Address Test Input Parameters

    Methodology

    1. Configure two test ports - one to generate the route ranges behind the DUT and the second to check for propagated DUT Summarized routes as well as traffic generation to destination routes.
    2. The RIP ports will advertise several routes into the DUT.
    3. The DUT then needs to summarize all of these routes if possible into a smaller number of routes and then propagate this to neighbors to minimize routing table entries.
    4. Verify that RIP peers and neighbors are connected and forwarding.
    5. Check the DUT's routing table to ensure the Route Summary is enabled and supported for the injected routes.
    6. Once route verification is successful, start traffic across the learned routes to determine whether the DUT is correctly forwarding traffic to the explicit host routes.


    Results

    Results can be viewed on the Tester Port-1, where the tester should be receiving routes from the DUT for only explicit host routes and they should be summarized. This allows the minimization of network traffic (Broadcast RIP Updates or Multicast RIP Update Messages), as well as smaller routing tables.

    Tester Explicit Host Routes Injected DUT Summary Routes Expected
    10.0.0.1 - 10.0.0.254 / 32
    or
    254 host routes     		10.0.0.0 / 24


    Figure 14. RIP IP Summary Address Test Results




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