Network Analysis for EWE AG and EWE TEL, Berlin, September 2002

Our customer
EWE AG is one of the largest, innovative and competitive companies within the energy service business in Germany. The company serves different regions across Germany with both electricity and gas supplies.

For a number of years, the multi service enterprise provides further services to their customers: Telecommunication, IT-Consulting, Facility Management, Accounting Systems and Environmental Services.

Administrative districts are majority shareholders with 72,6 % of EWE AG. In 2002, the company achieved a total revenue of 2,7 billion Euro. At the same time, the EWE group employed 3800 people.

EWE TEL (http://www.ewetel.de/) is one of the largest regional carriers in Germany and provides a wide variety of voice, Internet and data services: conventional telephone services, leased lines, Internet access, mobile phone services and network solutions. As a full service provider, EWE TEL has over 120.000 customers - including 16.000 business customers - the alternative in their region.

Project aims
The aim of the network analysis was to evaluate the performance of the core ATM network together with the local and wide area networks built upon the ATM core. The necessary tests and measurements had to be conducted within the production network of EWE AG and EWE TEL and critically, without interfering any of the users. A separate test bed was available only for reference tests. Another aim of the test was to verify benchmarks obtained by the network management system.

Description of the unique test scenarios
Performance and monitoring tests were conducted across the different ATM and Ethernet segments of the network. The tests evaluated the traffic characteristics on the data link layer, the network layer and the transport layer. Specifically, the following tests were performed:

• Reference tests to help us verify the maximum forwarding rate of the Gigabit Ethernet Switch
• Reference tests to help us verify the maximum end to end forwarding rate across different VLANs. This was both with and without ATM ELAN and was a test bed, similar to the production network
• Test of the maximum bandwidth between two locations within the production network, within one VLAN/ELAN and between two routed VLANs/ELANs with different traffic parameters (number of flows, uni/bidirectional streams)
• ATM monitoring to verify the ATM link between LAN Emulation Client (LEC) and LAN Emulation Server (LES/BUS) with reference to UNI- or LANE- signalling activity
• ATM forwarding- and latency tests to verify the performance characteristics of different ATM links between locations