To validate your solution, your test bed must reproduce the complexity and scale required to deliver bandwidth-intensive services with high QoE.
Mobile backhaul testing plays an important role in the migration from TDM to Ethernet. While Ethernet networks address the cost, efficiency and scalability issues of TDM networks, carriers must verify TDM-like performance and usability in areas like timing, synchronization, failover, OAM and provisioning.
What to Test
To ensure that new protocols like MPLS-TP, IEEE 1588 and SyncE can deliver the performance and usability of TDM and the economy and scalability of Ethernet in a single IP-based backhaul network, carriers should perform the following mobile backhaul tests:
To verify timing:
- EEC functionality, SSM protocol functionality and the synchronization trail
- Master switchover based on the source clock quality level
- Conformance of wander of a slave device to published standards
- Boundary clock functionality and accuracy
- Transparent clock functionality and residence times
- Performance of packet-based timing in the presence of high subscriber traffic and impairments
To verify provisioning:
- Interoperability between IP/MPLS and MPLS-TP
- Static provisioning of pseudowires in an MPLS-TP domain
- Dynamic provisioning of LDP-signaled pseudowires in an IP/MPLS domain
- Forwarding across multi-segment pseudowires
- OAM procedures and fault detection
- Protection switching
Spirent Solutions
Mobile backhaul testing solutions from Spirent help carriers verify network performance and usability:
- Landslide simulates real world traffic models to evaluate wireless core packet data networks
- Spirent TestCenter tests highly integrated, converged, anything-over-anything networks to ensure a seamless transition from TDM to Ethernet
- Spirent TestCenter Live monitors Ethernet performance, and actively tests and diagnoses Ethernet problems
- Spirent Global Services help carriers accelerate their migration from TDM to Ethernet by optimizing their investment in Spirent test solutions
