Practical End-to-End Performance Testing Tool for High Speed 3G-Based Networks


Abstract__High speed IP communication is a killer application for 3rd
generation (3G) mobile systems. Thus 3G network operators should perform
extensive tests to check whether expected end-to-end performances
are provided to customers under various environments. An important
objective of such tests is to check whether network nodes fulfill requirements
to durations of processing packets because a long duration of such
processing causes performance degradation. This requires testers (persons
who do tests) to precisely know how long a packet is hold by various
network nodes. Without any tool’s help, this task is time-consuming
and error prone. Thus we propose a multi-point packet header analysis
tool which extracts and records packet headers with synchronized
timestamps at multiple observation points. Such recorded packet headers
enable testers to calculate such holding durations. The notable feature
of this tool is that it is implemented on off-the shelf hardware platforms,
i.e., lap-top personal computers. The key challenges of the implementation
are precise clock synchronization without any special hardware and
a sophisticated header extraction algorithm without any drop.