New WLAN Testing Tool Simulates Actual Traffic Loads

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Portland, Oregon-based testing-systems vendor, VeriWave this week announced the release of a product that constitutes a brand new LAN testing concept in the 802.11 world: a suite of traffic simulations modeled on the actual traffic patterns of individual vertical industries.

WiMix Real World Traffic Tests, as the suite is called, eliminates guesswork associated with predicting how specific equipment and network configurations will perform when turned up in live environments. It is available in flavors for healthcare, education, office building, hot spot environments, government, and law enforcement.

The idea is to throw all of the likely forms of WLAN usage into the mix – e-mail, web, audio and video file transfers, corporate data applications, voice, and the like – and measure the overall quality of experience. This allows equipment manufacturers, network integrators and service providers to offer solutions tailored to specific industries, and IT managers to verify vendor claims and test network designs without compromising mission critical applications.

In the past, networking equipment vendors and integrators were forced to use real handsets and PCs in an attempt to simulate complex network interactions. As wireless LANs grow in scale, this kind of solution has become increasingly inadequate, according to Craig Mathias, principal at the Farpoint Group consultancy. “WiMix represents a big step forward in developing tools that can give both vendors and end-users a high degree of confidence that a given configuration will work as intended when put into operation,” Mathias said.

Eran Karoly, VeriWave’s vice president of marketing, points out that the costs of being wrong with regard to predicting performance rise exponentially once equipment goes live in a production network.

“Previous to WiMix, no viable alternative existed. With WiMix and the ability to generate a wide variety of real world traffic mixes, suppliers and users alike are able to pre-qualify solutions for specific industries as well as their own individual business environments,” said Karoly. “This is the first time anyone has taken the behavior of an entire real world network and integrated it into one test system to take the guesswork out of predicting performance.”

WiMix is available now. It can be run on VeriWave WaveTest systems or in VeriWave’s WaveLabs facility in San Jose, CA.

This article was first published on WiFiPlanet.com.