IxNetwork—Broadband Access and Authentication Test Solution

Highlights

• Ensure smooth deployment by testing under realistic access network scenarios with mixed subscriber types over same link and mixed unicast and multicast services over emulated subscribers

• Stress-test and measure subscriber management capability KPIs

• Evaluate IPv6 readiness of handling IPv4, IPv6, and dual-stack subscribers as well as mixed IPv4 and IPv6 data traffic performance

• Benchmark data forwarding performance of asymmetric upstream and downstream in access network

• Ensure reliable service and user QoE by characterizing performance of multicast infrastructure for delivering IPTV and triple-play service

• Validate basic network security by testing port-based and web-based access control

Problem: Growing Internet Users and Services Challenge Access Network Capacity and Service-Level Agreements

Growing Internet users and exploding service offerings are challenging existing access networks. Service providers are struggling to upgrade their networks with careful capacity planning and IPv6 transition considerations. Subscriber management capability of edge aggregation devices and access networks need to be thoroughly qualified and field trails carried out to ensure smooth deployment with minimum down time.

Solution: A Comprehensive Test Solution to Ensure Dynamic and Robust Access Networks

Keysight’s IxNetwork Broadband Access and Authentication test solution provides a rich set of emulations, including various subscriber protocols, unicast and multicast services, supplicants access control. It enables you to stress access networks under realistic conditions with mixed subscriber types and services to ensure thorough qualification of devices and services for smooth deployment with confidence of meeting subscriber SLAs.

Key features

• Emulates large number of PPPv4, PPPv6, Dual-Stack PPP subscribers, and intermediate agent over Ethernet and ATM, along with running services over emulated subscribers, to qualify subscriber management capability of edge aggregation devices like broadband network gateway (BNG) and broadband remote access server (BRAS)

• Emulates wholesale scenarios with PPP subscribers over L2TP to validate the capability of L2TP access concentrator (LAC) and L2TP network server (LNS) tunneling and terminating PPP subscribers

• Emulates IPoE subscribers including DHCPv4, DHCPv6, and dual-stack DHCP, along with running services over emulated subscribers to qualify subscriber management capability of edge aggregation devices like BNG and BRAS

• Emulate SLAAC (stateless address autoconfiguration) to test basic IPv6 host discovery and autoconfiguration capability

• Emulates ANCP-enabled access nodes, along with subscriber emulation to validate access node management and subscriber policy enforcement capability of edge aggregation devices such as BNG and BRAS

• Emulates IGMP/MLD queriers and receivers, and IPTV subscribers to qualify the effectiveness, performance, and robustness of multicast infrastructure

• Emulates IPv6 and dual-stack subscribers to validate IPv6 readiness of access network

• Realistic access network emulation with mixed subscriber types over same link, as well as mixed unicast and multicast services over emulated subscribers

• Packaged Asymmetric Data Performance QuickTest specially designed to benchmark data forwarding performance independently in upstream and downstream direction

• Emulates subscribers running over link aggregation with LACP bundle or static bundle to validate common access condition

• Emulates subscribers over EoGRE (or SoftGRE) to validate Wi-Fi offload use cases

• Automatic multicast tunneling (AMT) emulation qualifies the capability of AMT relay delivering multicast traffic to isolated unicast domain

• Emulates hundreds or thousands of supplicants with extensive set of controls and parameters to test authenticator at various scenarios

• Emulates vBRAS Control and User plane Separation Protocol (CUSP) to test Control Plane and User Plane separation of disaggregated Broadband Network Gateway (BNG), as per CMCC standards.

• The emulated vBRAS CP supports CUSP as control interface, VxLAN GPE as service interface and NETCONF as the management interface. It supports PPPoE, IPoE, Static subscribers and can act as L2TP LAC.

• Visit www.keysight.com for more details on IxNetwork