WAN Impairment Testing: Overview
Causing problems that disrupt vital services, network impairments are unavoidable impediments that enterprises and network operators must mitigate
Network imperfections, also known as impairments, can cause problems that deteriorate and disrupt vital services. Fueled by packet delay, jitter, packet loss, and other impairments that affect quality of experience (QoE), subscriber volatility puts companies at risk. These network impairments are unavoidable impediments that network designers and application authors need to mitigate.
Network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) must ensure their gear does not create unnecessary impairments and can withstand and compensate for a certain level of traffic impairments. They need to validate their devices for robustness in the presence of impairments to compete with other vendors and to ensure customer satisfaction.
Service providers, enterprises, and government agencies that own or run networks work hard to prevent the service quality problems caused by unexpected network impairments. To keep their customers happy and to maximize their capital investments, these network operators must ensure that their core network, consisting of many traditional and application-aware devices, maintains proper QoS necessary for all voice, video, and data traffic.
Ixia's ImpairNet™ is the industry's highest-density 1GE, 10GE, and 40GE test module for emulating real-life network impairments. Test modules offer unparalleled scaling, ease-of-use, and measurement accuracy and can be used to test variety of applications that run over the WAN network.