JUNE 30, 2008 -- Ixia (search for Ixia), provider of IP performance test systems, today announced what it claims is the industry's most realistic and scalable simulation of peer-to-peer (P2P) service traffic. According to the company, IxLoad P2P gives service providers the ability to validate the effect of P2P traffic on revenue-generating services at citywide scale. It also enables network equipment manufacturers to thoroughly test the accuracy and reliability of the detection and classification mechanisms of deep packet inspection (DPI)-capable, application-aware devices.
P2P traffic produces between 30% and 60% of worldwide Internet traffic and, as a result, can negatively impact the quality of experience (QoE) of mission-critical services such as voice and video. To track and manage P2P consumption of bandwidth, service providers rely on DPI-capable devices. DPI enables service providers to gain much better visibility into how subscribers are using broadband services, thus helping to determine what kind of new services should be offered in the future. Better visibility into the network also translates into improved performance, troubleshooting, and security monitoring. Ixia says its P2P tester, in conjunction with other multi-protocol emulations, can be used to validate the bandwidth management and QoS schemes deployed to ensure QoE is optimized for all users on the network.
Isocore, a leading technology validation and certification laboratory, used Ixia's P2P offering to validate QoS performance of 10-Gbit/sec application-aware devices. Application-layer forwarding is a very complex and resource-intensive task, making it critical to validate performance at line rates up to 10 Gbits/sec, say Isocore representatives.
"The P2P emulation provided by IxLoad simplifies the creation of real-world test environment for verifying inline DPI solutions," reports Rajiv Papneja, director of Isocore. "The intuitive user interface, coupled with the capability to emulate many P2P flows in addition to built-in set of libraries further simplifies the usage and test configurations."
Despite the negative connotation of P2P, it is a very efficient and resilient method of distributing content over IP networks, contend Ixia representatives. Increasingly, content providers are beginning to use peer-to-peer distribution technology to distribute popular commercial fare such as video. One such content provider is TVBank, based in Japan, which is focused on video content acquisition and video streaming systems.
Ixia says its IxLoad P2P tester enables engineers to simply turn a dial to scale up subscriber and bandwidth load. In addition, its P2P emulation capabilities mimic a variety of P2P traffic flows at user-defined parameters, including numbers of peers, connection rates, concurrent connections, and throughput.
"IxLoad offers an elegant mechanism for modeling the dynamic nature of subscribers, thereby ensuring complete test realism," contends Anupam Sahai, Ixia's vice president of Marketing. "The ability to dial to scale, combined with the ability to measure QoE on a per-subscriber basis, makes IxLoad's P2P emulation capabilities a valuable solution for validating service delivery networks."
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