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	Network Testing and Emulation Solutions

LANforge InterOp: WiFi Testing with Real Clients

For many years, WiFi access points' performance, scale, and functional testing in the lab had two different methodologies. One method was to benchmark the performance of the AP in completely isolated and conducted environments using RF chambers, emulated WiFi clients, and traffic generator tools. This method provided the most amount of the test coverage, determinism, and repeatability in testing, but it missed the key element of realism.

The second method relied on setting up a test lab in large walk-in screen room with lots of real devices and real application traffic. This method solved the realism problem, but at the cost of lack of proper automation and objective statistics on real application performance.

Candela LANforge InterOp solution attempts to bring the best of both worlds and provide a test solution that can scale and bring the realism, but at the same time provide automation and objective measurements of WiFi performance with real applications.

The LANforge InterOp product involves a set of completely automated testcases to test Access Points with real devices and real applications and measure and report KPIs.

Users install a lightweight LANforge InterOp software application on the end user devices and this software allows the test server to control these devices and run various tests. The endpoint application is made available on various standard and non-standard operation systems.

LANforge InterOp Features

• Realtime WiFi statistics display.
• Multiple device management and traffic generation.
• Ease of log fetching when faced with an issue.

LANforge InterOp Use Cases

RF Chambers:

• Control real devices in small numbers and run tests in RF chambers
• Tests normally run with a combination of virtual and real devices
• All real and virtual devices controlled from the same GUI or automation scripts.

Walk-In RF Screen Rooms:

• Setup large walk in screen rooms with 100+ real devices.
• Control all devices from a single test dashboard.
• Run tests at scale and get detailed test report.

Test House:

• Spread large amounts of real devices in a real house and run various fully automated tests.
• Generate detailed coverage and capacity heatmaps.

Real Campus Test Networks:

• Setup larger scale test neworks in real college campuses.
• Run tests with 100s of real devices using LANforge interop and gather KPIs.

LANforge InterOp Test Setup

LANforge Interop software allows both inband and out of band control of real devices from the LANforge server. All real devices can be connected via USB or Ethernet to the LANforge server for out of band controls and inband controls can be achieved to through the WiFi test interface.

After installing the software on all the devices and pointing them to the LANforge server, all devices will be discovered by the server and will show up on the device dashboard in the GUI from which the tester can control all the devices and run various tests.

Real application testing includes video streaming, web conferencing, web browsing and more. Testing be conducted on real devices without internet access as many different types of voice, video and data clips can be installed prior to test execution on the LANforge server. The tests can be run between the server and the real devices with only the AP under test in between.

LANforge InterOp Test Results

A wide variety of tests (as listed below) can be run:

• WiFi Capacity test
• Dataplane test
• Ping test
• Video streaming test
• Web page test
• HTTP file download test
• Long-term stability test
• Mixed traffic test

From the tests, key performance metrics such as throughput, packet loss, jitter, voice quality, video quality, webpage load times and more are measured in real time. From this data, charts and detailed test reports (in PDF, HTML, CSV and other formats) can be created.

Lead Times and Support:

Lead Times: Four to six weeks.

TaaS/Onsite Support: Customers with only occasional test needs can use our Test as a Service option. Candela engineers can do the testing for you in our fully equipped test lab and provide a detailed test report with recommendations.

For more information, please contact sales@candelatech.com or give us a call at: 1-360-380-1618