GL Communications adds Ethernet, IP testing to PacketExpert platform

Test and measurement equipment supplier GL Communications announced that it now offers Ethernet and IP test capabilities through its PacketExpert platform.

The PacketExpert is a portable, USB-based quad-port Ethernet tester with four Ethernet ports. Two of the four ports can be either electrical or optical; the other two are electrical only. The electrical ports support 10/100/1000 Mbps and the optical ports support 1 Gbps using SFP optical transceivers. The High Density version of the PacketExpert offers 12/24 Gigabit Ethernet ports for testing Gigabit Ethernet switches, routers, and network conditions. The HD chassis comprises both electrical and optical interfaces.

The company says its PacketExpert line supports all RFC 2544 tests for the performance benchmarking of individual network elements. These include throughput, latency, frame loss, and back-to-back tests. Similarly to BERT, RFC 2544 can be done over framed Ethernet (Layer 2), stacked VLAN (Q-in-Q), stacked MPLS, IP, and UDP, GL Communications says. Meanwhile, live packet network traffic can be captured and played back using the PacketExpert Record-Playback to simulate the varying characteristics of the real-time network in a test environment.

The PacketExpert with an available IPLinkSim feature emulates a bidirectional IP WAN link with varying capacities from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps for the electrical interfaces, and 1 Gbps for the optical interfaces via SFPs. A PacketExpert with the new ExpertSAM application can be used to validate service-level agreements (SLAs) as per ITU-T Y.1564 with a single test.

"With the capability to generate/receive traffic with stacked VLAN (Q-in-Q) and stacked MPLS, PacketExpert finds use in testing a wide range of networks – from testing individual links/switches, testing local Ethernet/IP networks (LAN), end to end testing of wide-area networks (WAN), testing core/MPLS networks, and much more," explains Jagdish Vadalia, a senior manager for product development at GL Communications. "Each GigE port provides independent Ethernet /VLAN/MPLS/IP/UDP testing at wire speed for applications such as wire-speed BERT and smart loopback."

Source: Lightwave