Multiplay services are driving the evolution of tomorrow’s networks. All of the traffic, services and users converge in the broadband access network. MPLS-enabled tunnels, differentiated traffic, new services and exploding bandwidth demands from mobile and fixed networks all contribute to a dramatic increase in complexity and scale of the broadband network.

For those responsible for creating and the networks of today and tomorrow, the challenges are clear. Will your solution:

• Manage bandwidth through quality of service policies per subscriber per service?
• Maintain user quality of experience (QoE) for high-bandwidth, drop- and delay-sensitive applications?
• Provide the performance and scalability required to support real users generating real traffic over a real network?
• Address and authenticate sessions for thousands of multiplay subscribers?
• Maintain stringent service quality levels across business customers as mandated by service level agreements?
• Ensure security and performance as mobile and fixed networks converge?

Schedule delays and performance problems discovered after release or deployment of multiplay services cost money and customers. In this kind of environment, everything can affect everything else. Validating each application and protocol individually will not predict how they will perform once deployed. The test bed must realistically reproduce the complexity and scale of the network.

Multiplay broadband networks and devices must scale, whether in bandwidth or traffic type or number of transactions, users, sessions, ports, tunnels or VLANs, while maintaining throughput, QoS and security. To test broadband networks and devices completely the test system must realistically emulate the multilayered protocols from adjacent devices and realistic application layer user traffic.