Network Emulators Catalog
Kataloge
The Keysight Network Emulators Catalog provides a comprehensive overview of Keysight’s portfolio of deterministic impairment platforms engineered to replicate real‑world network conditions in lab environments. Featuring the Network Emulator 2 and Network Emulator 3, the catalog enables engineers to evaluate application behavior, infrastructure resilience, and protocol interoperability with precise control over latency, jitter, congestion, packet loss, and other transport‑layer stressors. These tools recreate real‑world network conditions prior to deployment to reduce risk, ensure performance stability, and accelerate development cycles.
Keysight network emulators are designed to allow users to confidently validate devices, applications, and networks before field deployment. They emulate both everyday and worst‑case network scenarios—including link congestion, outages, multi‑hop delay chains, failover events, and jitter bursts—ensuring comprehensive evaluation of operational robustness. The catalog introduces two distinct solutions:
Network Emulator 2 platforms support precision impairment emulation for 100 MbE, 1GE, and 10GE environments. With an FPGA‑based 8‑port hardware architecture, this emulator delivers true line‑rate performance and allows engineers to mix interface speeds on a single device. The platform injects real‑world impairments such as delay, jitter, loss, reordering, duplication, and fragmentation, helping teams test application resilience, validate failover logic, and diagnose operational behavior under stress. Its compact form factor makes it ideal for R&D labs, QA validation, and SD‑WAN development workflows.
Key capabilities include:
- Precision delay, jitter, loss, and reorder injection
- Mixed‑speed configurations from 100 MbE to 10GE
- Scalable 2‑ or 8‑port configurations
- Manual or automatic resource allocation for optimized performance
Network Emulator 3 extends these capabilities into high‑speed environments, supporting 10GE, 25GE, 40GE, 50GE, and 100GE interface speeds. It delivers full line‑rate processing without packet drops, enabling realistic impairment modeling even at extremely high data rates. Ideal for large‑scale data centers, carrier transport networks, and disaster recovery validation, Network Emulator 3 supports two impairment engines per chassis, advanced filtering, real‑time packet capture, RESTful automation, and dynamic topology modeling.
Key capabilities include:
- High‑speed mixed‑rate impairments up to 100GE
- RESTful API with Python and TCL integration
- Integrated packet capture and replay
- Modular impairment cards supporting scalable memory and throughput
- Customizable L2–L7 filters for precise testing
The catalog also introduces a suite of related tools that integrate with Keysight network emulators to create complete real‑world test environments:
- Layer 2/3 traffic and protocol emulation to stress routers, switches, and SDN environments.
- Application traffic simulation supporting real‑world workloads—voice, video, messaging, web, and transactional data—to evaluate end‑user experience under load.
- Security threat emulation to assess how infrastructure handles malware, volumetric attacks, and protocol abuse traffic.
These complementary tools form a layered approach to validating both network behavior and user‑experience metrics from L2 through L7.
Automation, API Support, and Debugging Tools
Both Network Emulator 2 and Network Emulator 3 include robust automation features to support continuous integration and large‑scale network testing workflows:
- RESTful APIs enable integration with Python and TCL frameworks.
- Flexible resource management supports dynamic allocation of memory and throughput.
- Packet capture and replay streamline troubleshooting and provide reproducible test conditions.
Use Cases and Application Areas
These solutions support testing across:
- Enterprise IT and SD‑WAN tuning
- Data‑center and cloud infrastructure validation
- Transport networks and 5G backhaul
- Application performance profiling under degradation
- Protocol interoperability and standards validation
- Failover, redundancy, and outage recovery
- Disaster recovery planning
- Security evaluation under impaired network conditions
KeysightCare offerings are highlighted to reduce adoption time, optimize measurement workflows, and maintain high system uptime. Engineers can access prioritized support, accelerated calibration turnaround, and expert guidance to keep test environments running reliably. High‑performance instruments include one year of KeysightCare Assured by default.