A network testbed for commercial telecommunications product testing

Abstract

Have open-source network topology emulators out-grown the realm of academic and educational playgrounds? We tackle with that question by dissecting our experiences with preproduction testing of functional blocks implemented in commercial carrier-grade telco equipment, which we performed in a testbed based on open-source tools. As the concepts and mechanisms on which popular network emulation platforms are based vary, so does their applicability to different problem domains in telco product testing. Our survey of the existing open-source tools reveals that the spectrum of their features and limitations is multidimensional, with the choice of virtualization techniques applied being crucial to the raw packet processing throughput, topology size scaling, experiment instantiation speeds, and the flexibility of integrating diverse tools in a single testbed environment. We measured key performance metrics for two conceptually similar emulation platforms (IMUNES and CORE) running on different operating systems (FreeBSD and Linux). Three testbed scenarios for commercial telecommunication products were described and analyzed.