PacketCheck™ - Software Ethernet/IP Tester

PacketCheck™ is a comprehensive PC based Ethernet / IP test tool with BERT and Throughput testing abilities. It is very easy to use as a general purpose network performance analysis tool for 10Mbps, 100Mbps and 1Gbps LANs and WANs.

  BROCHURE

• Overview
• BERT
• Operation
• Layer-wise testing
• Configuration
• Delay Measurements
• Statistics & Reports
• Resources

Overview

GL's enhanced PacketCheck™ is a comprehensive PC based Ethernet / IP test tool with BERT and Throughput testing abilities. It is a general purpose network performance analysis tool for 10Mbps, 100Mbps and 1Gbps LANs and WANs. Throughput up to 800 Mbps can be easily tested.

PacketCheck™ makes use of PC's network interface card (NIC) to transmit and receive Ethernet or IP packets over the network.

The application generates multi stream Ethernet/IP/UDP traffic with on-demand bandwidth (up to 500 Mbps) and measures end to end performance such as Bit Error Rate, Total Packets, Packet loss, Out of Sequence Packets, and Errored Packets. Additional features include transmission of pre-recorded file traffic, GTP traffic simulation, Bursty and Fixed IFG (Inter Frame Gap) traffic generation mode, Delay measurements, impairment generation, and BER testing capability with provision to generate PRBS patterns or user–defined test patterns.

Also included is a powerful Report Generation feature to view report in XML and PDF formats.

Product Videos

PacketCheck™ can operate on - Layer 1 (Physical), Layer 2 (Data Link), Stacked VLAN (Q-in-Q), Layer 2.5 (Stacked MPLS), Layer 3 (Network), and Layer 4 (Transport) of the OSI reference model.

PacketCheck™ at Layer 1 (Physical), Layer 2 (Data Link) with Stacked VLAN tag,
Layer2.5 (MPLS), Layer 3 (Network), and Layer 4 (Transport) of OSI model

Applications

• Determine the maximum throughput and error rates in a LAN / WAN
• Determine Round Trip Delay (RTD) with microsecond accuracy
• Determine One Way Delay (OWD) between two NIC cards with microseconds accuracy
• Test network infrastructure for dropped packets, errors, latency, and so on
• Detect traffic overload
• Test network behavior with real world traffic like IPTV, VoIP and more
• Test CAT 6 / CAT 5 cables for efficiency

Main Features

• Generate full duplex traffic at any of the four layers (Layer1, Data Link with stacked VLAN/ MPLS, Network, Transport) with on-demand bandwidth
• Test Ethernet or IP/UDP traffic of up to 500 Mbps bandwidth
• Customizable VLAN stacks up to 3 levels with headers such as VLAN Type, ID, and Priority
• Customizable stacked MPLS layers up to 3 levels with headers such as Label, CoS, TTL
• Test end-to-end performance, including:
  • Bit-error-rate testing (BERT) on layer 1, layer 2, layer 2.5, layer 3, and layer 4 with various measurements - Bit Error Rate, Sync Loss Count, Bit Error Count, and more
  • Throughput, packet loss, packet counts, and out of sequence packets
  • Errored packets
  • User definable impairment insertion
  • Independent measurements per stream
  • Start and stop each stream independently at any time
  • Add any number of streams at run time even if some streams have already started
• Quickly configure hundreds of Ethernet/IP/UDP streams:
  • Create 100+ full-duplex streams per PacketCheck™ easily
  • Each stream can be configured as Transmit Only, Receive Only, or Transmit and Receive
  • Ability to copy from one stream to another (both one-to-one copy and one-to-many copy) to quickly configure multiple streams
  • Define unique MAC/IP addresses for each stream
  • Define separate Frame size/Rate for each stream
  • Customizable protocol headers like MAC Source/Destination address, Length/Type field, IP Source/destination address, and UDP Source/Destination Port
• Confirm multi stream and multi destination connectivity among all nodes:
  • Generate multi-stream traffic with varying frame size, bandwidth, MAC, MPLS, IP and UDP parameters, payloads, and modes of operation
  • Control transmit and receive streams independently
  • Ability to resolve IP Address to MAC address (based on Address Resolution Protocol (ARP)) for all streams with a single click, so that all streams are configured properly before starting the test
  • Populate switch/router MAC tables and routing tables using the Resolve all streams feature before the starting the test to avoid unnecessary flooding
• Multi-layer operation:
  • Independently define each stream to operate as Layer2 (Ethernet) or Layer3 (IP) or Layer4 (UDP)
  • For Layer3 or Layer4 streams, analyzes the received payload based on the IP or UDP length and ignore any MAC padded bytes added in transit
• Bandwidth Control:
  • Define the frame size/rate to be generated for each stream Independently
  • Frame sizes from 22 bytes up to 1518 supported
  • Up to 500 Mbps total combined rate (all streams combined) is possible
  • Jumbo frames also supported
  • The transmission rate can be configured to operate in 2 modes – Burst mode or Inter Frame Gap (IFG) mode
  • In Burst mode, each stream's rate can be set in Mbps, Kbps, etc.
  • Burst mode tries to generate traffic with the configured rate, but also as smoothly and evenly distributed so that the Device Under Test (DUT) node buffers do not overflow due to a temporary spike in the peak traffic
  • In IFG mode, the Inter Frame gap in milliseconds can be configured. The estimated rate achievable based on the IFG and the frame size is displayed for user convenience
• PRBS Pattern Generation/Verification of various patterns like QRSS 2⁶-1, 2⁹-1, 2¹¹-1, 2¹⁵-1, 2²⁰-1, 2²³-1
• User Defined test patterns – up to 24 bytes length
• Simulate real-world traffic (such as IPTV, RTP) by transmitting packets using pre-captured GL proprietary HDL files
• Generate various run-time impairments – insert/delete bytes, and byte level impairments
• Use a full-featured version or a loopback only version (with address swapping) at node endpoints
• Monitor performance per stream – throughput, Round Trip Delay (RTD), One Way Delay (OWD), total packets, packet loss, out of sequence frames, error frames, correct pattern frames, pattern sync status, bit error rate, sync loss count, error count etc.
• Generate reports in XML or PDF formats