IxLoad Overview — Converged Multiplay Service Validation

Ensure performance and QoE with highly scalable, easy-to-use testing

Problem: Endangered Quality of Experience

In today’s highly competitive landscape, organizations must meet stringent network quality requirements to deliver the best customer experience. However, a widening array of multimedia applications, and an increasing number of users, is making it harder — and more expensive — than ever to validate converged multiplay services and application delivery platforms. Without a way to properly test these services, customer quality of experience (QoE) is at risk.

Solution: A Highly Scalable Solution for Faster QoE Insight

IxLoad delivers comprehensive performance testing for validating user QoE. IxLoad works by emulating web, video, voice, storage, VPN, wireless, infrastructure, and encapsulation/security protocols to create realistic scenarios. A modular system design allows IxLoad to scale with your infrastructure while real- time QoE metrics let you drill down to quickly identify network degradations and isolate breaking points. Because IxLoad is as easy to use as it is effective, you don’t have to be a protocol expert to achieve complete end-to-end service validation.

Key Features

• Offers the industry’s highest HTTP, SSL, and IPsec performance and scale

• Delivers end-to-end testing of converged wireless and wired application delivery infrastructure and services

• Provides real-time insight into QoE

• Emulates fully integrated broadband network infrastructures with application traffic testing

• Serves as the only test solution in the market that can model the dynamic nature of user behavior

• Achieves seamless application performance validation across physical and virtual networks

Specifications

Application layer protocols

IxLoad delivers a wide variety of fully stateful protocols to emulate a complete multiplay user environment. It delivers a sophisticated subscriber modeling capability that enables users to model the dynamic nature of subscriber behavior. Keysight’s purpose-built chassis and load modules empower IxLoad to generate city-scale traffic. This, along with comprehensive network support, advanced test timelines and automatic goal-seek fine-tuning to meet test objective, enables users to comprehensively assess the performance of their service delivery networks and determine application-level performance with a single integrated solution.

Sophisticated subscriber modeling

To closely model real-world device and network load, IxLoad uses a unique approach called subscriber modeling that enables users to:

• Emulate multiple application services per subscriber or user, including service sequencing

• Model traffic usage over time for each application, with advanced timelines

• Simulate the temporal nature of subscribers connecting and disconnecting from the network in a dynamic manner

• Completely control usage profile — websites visited, e-mail servers used, transfer sizes, channel changing behavior, streaming content, protocol options, and so on

AppLibrary

In addition to the fully stateful protocols emulations, IxLoad includes AppLibrary, and extensive library of pre-defined application flows that simulate end-user interactions and devices. It speeds and simplifies testing application performance with blended application mixes. AppLibrary uses Keysight’s Application and Threat Intelligence (ATI) program to ensure the flows are current and are updated monthly.