Network Impairment Testing
Impair to Become Aware
Network impairments, or imperfections, can put network performance at risk and thus jeopardize key aspects of a company's operation. Subscriber volatility is fueled by packet delay, jitter, packet loss, and other problems that impair and disrupt vital services and affect subscribers' quality of experience. These network imperfections are unavoidable impediments that network designers and application authors need to mitigate.
Lab vs. Life
When testing new services or products, what is needed is an emulated network cloud – one that mirrors the complexity and changeability that are seen in real network environments. A network cloud moves data using a wide variety of protocols, encapsulations, and physical media. In a packet-switched network, no two packets will necessarily follow the same physical path or use the same set of technologies.
- Network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) must ensure that their products do not create unnecessary impairments and can withstand and even compensate for a certain level of impairment that is naturally introduced into the network infrastructure.
- Service providers, enterprises, and government agencies must work hard to prevent the service quality problems caused by unexpected network impairments in order to keep their customers happy and maximize their capital investments.
Irrespective of which part of a network you may be testing – access, edge, core, or applications running across a WAN – the best way to ensure that a network design allows for the correct functioning of application protocols is to verify in pre-deployment.
Causing problems that disrupt vital services, network impairments are unavoidable impediments that enterprises and network operators must mitigate.
Pre-Deployment Testing: An Ounce of Prevention...
Pre-deployment testing allows you to discover problems that would have been missed in a traditional test bed and fix them before deployment, saving time and money. It is always easier and less costly to correct issues that can come from real-world usage before products are in the real world, being actively used by customers.
Network impairment simulation offers high flexibility in the test scenarios executed to determine the quality of service for network operators. This simulation enhances the capabilities of the pre-deployment testing facilities. It enables sustainable quantity and quality metrics measurement for user capacity benchmarking for new site deployments.
It also offers great help to network engineers qualifying the solution for the deployment by simulation of limited bandwidth conditions, a congested backhaul link with increased buffer usage that introduces high jitter and delay or even incorrect QoS tagging for specific network traffic.
Network Impairment Testing Solutions: A Pound of Cure
Ixia's comprehensive network impairment test solutions can accurately emulate infrastructure, mobile backhaul, multimedia, security, and storage and application networks, while providing repeatable results that will not fluctuate when the same tests are performed at different times or in different labs.
Ixia's test and measurement solutions provide international standards compliance test suites and network models and an intuitive graphical user interface for testing, measuring, and recording results.
Learn how companies are using Ixia's solutions to conduct network impairment testing to validate network and application performance.
