IxNetwork–Routing and Switching Test Solution

Problem: Existing Network Strained with Increased Bandwidth Demand and Complexity

Routing and switching are fundamental Internet backbone infrastructure, providing Ethernet and IP underlay for value-added overlay networks and services. To handle the heterogeneous requirement of  the Internet, a set of protocols provide Layer 2 and Layer 3 connectivity across different networks, apply traffic engineering aspects to optimize routing, connect multiple administration domains with policy control, implement fast failure detection and recovery mechanisms, handle abnormal condition, etc. These are all essential to provide a scalable and highly available backbone network. With exploding Internet users and services, as well as the complexity of the network, it is critical to ensure the core network infrastructure can be scaled out with robustness to meet today’s business demand with satisfied service level agreement (SLA).

Solution: Comprehensive Testing to Ensure Highly-Available and Robust Network Infrastructure 

The IxNetwork Routing and Switching test solution provides a rich set of routing and switching protocol emulations to qualify performance at Internet scale, convergence and failover, restart capability, as well as benchmarking suites for data forwarding performance. 

It enables users to stress devices and networks under realistic conditions, measure key performance indicators (KPIs) to meet deployment requirements, validate IPv6 readiness of core network infrastructure to ensure smooth network upgrade and new network creation supporting value-added services.

Highlights

• Test Internet infrastructure under realistic conditions with mixed routing and switching protocols running simultaneously 

• Test Internet scale with emulation and real Internet routing table import 

• Ensure core network high availability by validating the robustness of devices handing abnormal behaviors, through session and route flapping test, as well as long duration test

• Qualify the ability of fast failure detection and sub-second recovery 

• Validate graceful restart and routing convergence capability to reduce network instability and downtime 

• Assess network readiness to handle mixed IPv4 and IPv6 Internet routes and traffic 

• Benchmark data forwarding performance to ensure satisfied latency/jitter and other KPIs 

• Characterize performance of multicast infrastructure to efficiently deliver multicast traffic with replication

Key Features

• Emulates IGP speaking routers, supporting ISIS, OSPF, EIGRP and RIP, advertises a large number of routes, and simulates complex IGP topology to test protocol functionality, scale, and performance

• Emulates both IBGP and EBGP advertising large number of routes to stress test DUT performance and policy control, as well as importing real internet routes to validate DUT performance under real internet routing table

• BFD emulates heartbeat sessions along with routing protocols to validate quick failure detection and failover recovery to ensure minimum interruption on network failure

• BGP FlowSpec emulation validates DDoS mitigation as well as policy enforcement in SDN networks at scale with flow match and actions. 

• Flexible action sets simulate dynamic network condition with routing sessions and routes flapping to validate the stability and robustness of the implementation handling abnormal behavior of internet network.

• Running multiple protocols simultaneously over one or multiple ports along with line-rate traffic to simulate real network condition

• Emulates Link Aggregation with LACP bundle or static bundle to qualify routing protocols and traffic over LAG

• Support IPv6 version of above-mentioned routing protocols to test IPv6 control and data plane performance and mixed v4/v6 support to ensure IPv6 readiness of core network

• Emulate PIM-SM/SSM, IGMP/MLD querier and receiver to qualify multicast infrastructure forwarding and replicating multicast traffic 

• Emulate NTP client to validate NTP server function and scale/performance to support large number of NTP clients

• Packaged RFC 2554, 2889, 3918 QuickTest to benchmark data forwarding performance of routing and switching devices and end-to-end networks