Test Areas

In order to meet service providers' converged networks needs we developed a test plan together with participating vendors testing the following areas which services providers deem important to the delivery of triple play, business and mobile transport over a unified network.

• Diverse Transport and Access Technologies - The mobile backhaul network was built using the three leading carrier Ethernet technologies: MPLS, PBB-TE (Provider Backbone Bridge Traffic Engineering), and T-MPLS.  These technologies provided transport for mobile backhaul applications as well as Ethernet services.  QoS markings were used to distinguish between the different types of services and shape them accordingly.
• MEF Defined Services - All three of the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) defined Ethernet services were configured in the network: Ethernet Virtual Private Line (point-to-point) Ethernet Private LAN (multipoint-to-multipoint) were tested, and one Ethernet Tree (point-to-multipoint) service was demonstrated.
• Circuit Emulation Services - A wide range of circuit emulation services, imperative to several mobile backhaul migration scenarios were tested. Both ATM and TDM based Circuit Emulation Services (CES) were tested over MPLS, PBB-TE and T-MPLS network areas.  All CES services were tested according to their perspective RFCs and MEF standards.
• Clock Synchronization - Various clock synchronization methods were tested and demonstrated. Adaptive Clock according to MEF 8 and MEF 3 was tested along side clock recovery mechanisms based on CES and several unique demos were shown.
• Ethernet OAM - We observed increasing maturity in the area of Ethernet OAM tests. Vendors tested the IEEE defined Connectivity Fault Management (802.1ag) and Ethernet in the First Mile (8023ah) with almost no problems.  Vendors tested EFM OAM discovery, Loopback Mode, and Dying Gasp Messages as well as CFM's Continuity Check, linktrace and loopback.
• Resiliency - A variety of resiliency mechanisms were tested as the transport technologies were so diverse.  In addition to standard LACP on Ethernet interfaces, MPLS devices tested Fast Reroute and Dual Homed MTUs, T-MPLS devices showed 1:1 as well as 1+1 protection as defined by the ITU-T, and PBB-TE showcased protection using CFM.
• Performance Monitoring - Vendors tested Performance Monitoring as defined by ITU-T Y.1731, and measured Frame Delay, Frame Delay Variation, and Frame Loss Ratio in accordance to MEF 10.1.
• Bandwidth profiles - these MEF defined constructs were tested both per EVC, and per Class of Service. Traffic was then applied to a certain bandwidth profile at the UNI and shaped accordingly depending on either the COS markings or the EVC from which the traffic is received

Test Results

All test areas and results are described in the white paper.