Network Emulator 3: 100GE, 50GE, 40GE, 25GE, and 10GE Impairment

Problem: Knowing How Networks and Devices Will Behave Under Real-world Conditions

Effective testing requires a real-world environment that reproduces realistic network conditions and behavior. All software and hardware should be subjected to a realistic test environment before deployment.

Solution: Real-World Network Impairment Testing

Network Emulator 3 (NE3) is a precision test instrument for 100GE, 50GE, 40GE, 25GE, and 10GE Ethernet impairment. The device allows users to accurately emulate the real network conditions that occur over live production LAN/WAN networks. By emulating realistic and worst-case network conditions in the lab, users can validate and test performance of new hardware, protocols, and applications to prevent failures in production networks. The Network Emulator 3 offers a rich featureset to allow testing in a controlled lab environment with repeatable and predictable impairments. The NE3 enables user to perform the following tests:

• Test 5G networks and the impact of delay and impairments

• Test the effect of delay on the network and application performance

• Determine how applications will perform when distributed across data centers

• Cause outage and degrade scenarios to trigger and validate fail-over protection

Highlights

Emulate real-world networks in the lab

• Enables validation, performance, and interoperability testing

• Test products and applications to characterize end user experience under real-world conditions

• Precisely reproduce and quickly resolve issues occurring in the field

Key features

• 100GE / 50GE / 40GE / 25GE / 10GE impairment emulation

• 1 or 2 impairment engines FPGA hardware architecture allows 100 % line-rate performance

• Test mixed speeds at the same time with one device

• Flexible resource management

• High port count 100GE, 50GE, 40GE, 25GE, and 10GE FPGA emulator

• FPGA hardware-based architecture provides maximum precision and accuracy • Modular appliance allowing impairment of one or two data lines

• One impairment engine per card enables impairment of one data line

• Optional second impairment card available 

• Dedicated FPGA processors per card ensures high performance

• Flexible Resource Management enables allocation of resources as needed by allowing automatic or manual memory allocation

• Precisely emulates delays and impairment that exist in Ethernet networks

• Transparent to any higher-layer L2/7 protocols

• Optical media physical layer clock transparency for SyncE support

• Test automation through RESTful Web API, which allows control by TCL and languages such as Python

• Packet Capture

Primary Use Cases

• 5G delay and impairment testing

• Performance testing of critical applications over Ethernet with realistic network conditions and impairments

• Combine with IxNetwork, IxLoad, and BreakingPoint test systems to create a complete real-world test environment 

• Real-world interoperability and customer proof-of-concept (PoC) testing 

• Corporate LAN/WAN emulation 

• Business continuity and disaster recovery testing

• Server consolidation/migration 

• Application cloud migration and storage extension

• Wireless/mobile delay and impairment simulation 

• Satellite network delay emulation

• Reuse and build proprietary or standard-based Layer 2–7 protocol filter with the Customizable Filter Library

• Cause outage and degrade scenarios triggering fail-over protection