About dsTest

dsTest is targeted for network equipment manufacturers and service providers to enable reduced time to market of new services while ensuring the network quality and performance requirements are not compromised. It allows you to validate the network performance and capacity in a realistic network environment with a mix of subscriber profiles, replicating a deployed configuration.

Designed explicitly to facilitate the cost-effective testing of high performance protocols and applications, dsTest is focused on core network service interfaces to support your network evolution testing. A suite of common components expedites the development cycle, allowing us to provide testing capabilities in a time frame that can assist both vendors and carriers during the development and deployment of the evolved core network. dsTest provides a base from which new protocols and applications can be quickly developed to support new standards or custom protocols and applications.

Measure call performance and capacity

Verify new mobility features and standards before deployment

Identify performance ceilings and bottlenecks

Validate system scalability with easily scalable subscriber loads

Plan capacity

Interactive control and monitoring for real-time test configuration, event triggering, and measurement sampling

Unattended test modes for users creating real-world scenarios with heavy load and long-duration stability tests

Network interface applications (client simulators or service node emulators) are individually licensed, allowing you to purchase only the interface functionality that your test plans require. Applications focus on true emulation rather than scripted commands and responses. Support node emulators implement interaction between active interfaces where applicable when more than one interface is licensed.

 

Architecture

Platform

Where dsTest and dsClient Terminal applications are hosted

Protocol engine and run-time subscriber database

Controlled via XML or JSON locally or remotely

Control interface options are XML over TCP or JSON with HTTP (REST)

XML files may be loaded during initialization, via dsClient Terminal, or dsClient Desktop

XML schema used for control and validation is a published interface

Command Line Client

Provides command line control of co-located dsClient Terminal, via SSH or telnet, including run-time interaction

Automation available via scripting languages such as TcL

Automation Clients

Drive a remote dsClient Terminal with a co-located automation client using XML-formatted configurations and commands

Directly interact with dsTest through its RESTful API

Send POST, PUT, and DELETE messages containing JSON data to load configurations or to issue complex commands

Use GET messages to issue simple commands or to query current values

dsClient Desktop

Standalone dsClient Desktop application for Windows and Linux platforms

XML wizard produces dsTest XML from graphic configuration

XML Library for configuration snippets and complete XML documents

Real-time value and structure validation

Supports simultaneous connections to multiple servers

Operation Measurements (OM) display and graphing

Capacity and Performance

In an optimal configuration, dsTest supports the following maximums on the reference platform:

More than 200,000,000 subscribers, depending on memory capacity and emulator configuration (number of nodes, number of interfaces, and the number of features enabled)

Expanded memory capacity results in a nearly linear expansion of subscriber/session capacity

Up to 40,000 transactions per second per active core (an application layer request/response exchange is considered a transaction)

 

Performance can be impacted by:

the number of messages required for each call

the amount of subscriber data required for each message

the number of features enabled

the cache structure/size

the memory bus and I/O throughput

the number of CPU cores and CPU clock speed

 

Capacity is largely based on the amount of available memory and can also be impacted by the configuration.

The performance statistics above were gathered while operating dsTest on the current reference platform:

Dell

32-Core Intel Xeon E5-4650 @ 2.70GHz;

524GB (32X16MB) 1600 MHz Dual Rank Memory.

Ubuntu 12.10 X86_64 Server Edition.