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.