Practical end-to-end performance testing tool for high speed 3G-based networks

  • Authors:
  • Hiroyuki Shinbo;Atsushi Tagami;Shigehiro Ano;Toru Hasegawa;Kenji Suzuki

  • Affiliations:
  • KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc., Fujimino-shi, Saitama, Japan;KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc., Fujimino-shi, Saitama, Japan;KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc., Fujimino-shi, Saitama, Japan;KDDI R&D Laboratories Inc., Fujimino-shi, Saitama, Japan;The University of Electro-Communications, Chofu-shi, Tokyo, Japan

  • Venue:
  • ICTSS'10 Proceedings of the 22nd IFIP WG 6.1 international conference on Testing software and systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

High speed IP communication is a killer application for 3rd generation (3G) mobile systems. Thus 3G network operators should perform extensive tests to check whether expected end-to-end performances are provided to customers under various environments. An important objective of such tests is to check whether network nodes fulfill requirements to durations of processing packets because a long duration of such processing causes performance degradation. This requires testers (persons who do tests) to precisely know how long a packet is hold by various network nodes. Without any tool's help, this task is time-consuming and error prone. Thus we propose a multi-point packet header analysis tool which extracts and records packet headers with synchronized timestamps at multiple observation points. Such recorded packet headers enable testers to calculate such holding durations. The notable feature of this tool is that it is implemented on off-the shelf hardware platforms, i.e., lap-top personal computers. The key challenges of the implementation are precise clock synchronization without any special hardware and a sophisticated header extraction algorithm without any drop.