White Paper
ACCEDIAN
NETWORKS
PACKET PERFORMANCE ASSURANCE TM
In-Service & Targeted Throughput Testing
Testing service capacity is critical at turn up to ensure
baseline performance is up to spec. However, once the
service is in operation, any changes to network
configuration or customer usage can affect bandwidth
committed in service level agreements (SLAs).
To validate service capacity and demonstrate SLA
compliance to customers, service providers can now use
seamless, in-service throughput testing to measure the
Committed & Excess Information Rates (CIR, EIR) of a
service without disrupting customer traffic or waiting for
maintenance windows to perform out-of-service testing.
Because it is non-intrusive, In-service throughput testing
can be performed at peak usage hours where network
congestion and bandwidth issues are most likely to occur.
Test Traffic
Customer Traffic
Provider
Network
When deploying a new service over an existing Ethernet
Virtual Circuit (EVC), providers often need to simulate the
service in order to pre-qualify QoS in the context of live
customer traffic. In this case a more intrusive, traditional
throughput testing technique can be used (e.g. RFC-2544),
where targeted, service-emulating traffic is generated and
analyzed.
In both cases, the tests should be conducted end-to-end in
order to properly reflect the customer’s quality of service
experience and SLA requirements.
© 2008 Accedian Networks, Inc.
In-Service & Targeted
Throughput Testing
Executive Summary
This white paper focuses on the complementary
nature of traditional traffic generation and analysis
and the recent introduction of in-service throughput
testing, a technology that allows operators to validate
service performance and troubleshoot bandwidth
delivery issues without disrupting customer traffic.
These tests are ideally performed by Ethernet Network
Interface Devices (NIDs) with integrated testing
capabilities, as they are installed in-line with customer
traffic at the service demarcation point. This ensures that
test traffic and customer traffic traverse the same network
topology, while covering the full end-to-end link the
provider is responsible for.
In-Service Throughput Testing
Standard RFC-2544 throughput testing involves generating
and analyzing a stream of test packets that are sent at a
speed up to full line rate. This intrusive technique would
directly interfere with customer traffic if conducted in-service,
so it is normally reserved for out-out-service turn-up or
troubleshooting test applications.
In-service throughput testing uses the customer’s traffic as
part of the test pattern – additional synthetic traffic is
dynamically added to live traffic to create a seamless flow at a
particular rate.
ACCEDIAN.com
 White Paper
ACCEDIAN
NETWORKS In-Service & Targeted
PACKET PERFORMANCE ASSURANCE TM Throughput Testing

Traffic over time

1,000 Mbps
CIR = 200 Mbps
Generated Y.1731 Traffic
Customer Traffic 0 Mbps

EtherNID EtherNID
Traffic Provider Network Traffic
Generator Analyzer

In-Service Traffic Generation & Analysis

NIDs with all-hardware, silicon-based architectures can In the test flow shown below a CIR of 200Mbps is being
measure the instantaneous rate of live traffic and supplement validated. This service also has an EIR of 50Mbps (for a
it with additional test traffic in real-time (with processing total rate of 250Mbps). Customer traffic can continue to
speed on the order of microseconds). Importantly, this is a peak into the EIR region without affecting the CIR test.

unidirectional test, unlike traditional RFC-2544 loopback

testing that cannot independently analyse upstream and
downstream performance.
CIR Testing
To validate committed throughput, supplemental test traffic is
added to the customer traffic to provide a total rate equivalent
to the CIR (as specified at layer 2 or 3). To ensure that the
test traffic “rides along” with the customer traffic, the Ethernet
& IP frame characteristics are set to mimic client packets –
matching class of service (CoS, DSCP), destination IP
address, customer and provider VLAN tags, etc.
The traffic analyzer at the far end of the link monitors the total
received throughput. If the total matches the CIR over a given
period, the service is performing as expected. If the total is
less than the specified rate, the CIR is not being delivered by
the network. In this case the generated test packets will be
dropped before customer traffic is impacted; test traffic is
tagged as drop-eligible Y.1731 OAM frames.
250 EIR
200 CIR
Test Traffic
Customer Traffic
In-Service CIR Testing, Pass Result
EIR Testing
A service’s Excess Information Rate can be tested the same
way, where the total traffic load is set to the specified EIR.
The diagrams below show both pass and fail scenarios, where
in the latter case congestion has impacted the network’s
ability to deliver the customer’s full bandwidth profile.
Invaluable for SLA validation and non-intrusive trouble-
shooting, in-service throughput testing can also be used as a
traffic engineering tool to validate oversubscription
provisioning assumptions, or to test an access or core network
segment’s capacity under peak usage hours.

© 2008 Accedian Networks, Inc. ACCEDIAN.com

 White Paper
ACCEDIAN
NETWORKS In-Service & Targeted
PACKET PERFORMANCE ASSURANCE TM Throughput Testing

Congestion
250 EIR 250 EIR
200 CIR 200 CIR

In-Service EIR Testing, Pass In-Service EIR Testing, Fail

Targeted Traffic Generation

Complementing in-service throughput testing is the intrusive traffic
generation and analysis approach normally used for turn up
testing (specified by the IEEE RFC-2544 for Ethernet, frequently
extended to layer 3 testing). This technique can also be used over
a live EVC to simulate increased service use or to validate a link’s
capacity for a new application (incremental service turn-up and
provisioning). In this case, testing is not conducted at the full wire-
speed: generated traffic reproduces the rate and characteristics of
a particular service flow.
The result is an overlay of incremental test traffic added to live
customer data. Like in-service testing, test traffic can be
tagged as drop-eligible to minimize impact to customer traffic
should the total transmission rate exceed link capacity.
Test Results
Results for in-service, turn-up, and targeted throughput testing
typically include received bandwidth, frame loss, out-of-order
or duplicate packets, gaps and maximum gap size, as well as

Add layer 2 / 3 traffic to simulate a service latency and jitter – the complete set of metrics specified in the
250 EIR
RFC-2544 standard – providing complete end-to-end
200 CIR troubleshooting and benchmarking data.

In the case of in-service testing, all figures reported are

measured one-way (as opposed to round-trip) including
unidirectional latency and jitter.
Targeted Traffic Generation

EtherNID™ & MetroNID™ Demarc Units

Accedian Networks’ EtherNID™ and MetroNID™ packet assurance
demarcation units feature patent-pending in-service Ethernet & IP
throughput testing. The units’ Fast-Thru, all-hardware architecture
ensures customer traffic flows unaffected during testing, while
concurrently providing a complete array of Ethernet OAM, service
assurance and creation functionality directly at the service edge.
METER
For more information about Accedian Networks solutions, please visit
In-Service Test Set EVC Shaping, Assure Demarc &
our document library on Accedian.com. RFC-2544 Support Creation Policing SLAs Loopback

Accedian Networks Accedian Networks’ Packet Performance Assurance solutions enable carrier-grade, packet-based
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Version: Nov 08

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