Test serving network element subscriber session and mobility management functionality with our HSS and HLR server emulators. Test HSS, HLR, and EIR capacity and performance with our interface simulator applications.

Test serving network element policy, credit, and charging functionality with our PCRF, OCS, OFCS and gsmSCF server emulators. Test the capacity and performance of policy and credit management servers with our interface simulation applications.

Test Short Message Service functionality in UMTS, CSFB for LTE, and generic IP-CAN access models.

Location Services (LCS) interfaces for mapping functions, delivery of location information, positioning QoS, and location based services (LBS).

dsTest is targeted for network equipment manufacturers and service providers to enable reduced time to market of new services while ensuring the network quality and performance requirements are not compromised. It allows you to validate the network performance and capacity in a realistic network environment with a mix of subscriber profiles, replicating a deployed configuration.

Designed explicitly to facilitate the cost-effective testing of high performance protocols and applications, dsTest is focused on 3G and 4G core network service interfaces to support your network evolution testing. A suite of common components expedites the development cycle, allowing us to provide testing capabilities in a timeframe that can assist both vendors and carriers during the development and deployment of the evolved core network. dsTest provides a base from which new protocols and applications can be quickly developed to support new standards or custom protocols and applications.

• Measure call performance and capacity
• Verify new mobility features and standards before deployment
• Identify performance ceilings and bottlenecks
• Validate system scalability with easily scalable subscriber loads
• Plan capacity
• Interactive control and monitoring for real-time test configuration, event triggering, and measurement sampling
• Unattended test modes for users creating real-world scenarios with heavy load and long-duration stability tests

Network interface applications (client simulators or service node emulators) are individually licensed, allowing you to purchase only the interface functionality that your test plans require. Applications focus on true emulation rather than scripted commands and responses. Support node emulators implement interaction between active interfaces where applicable when more than one interface is licensed.

In an optimal configuration, dsTest supports the following maximums on the reference platform:

• More than 100,000,000 subscribers, depending on memory capacity and emulator configuration (number of nodes, number of interfaces, and the number of features enabled)
• Expanded memory capacity results in a nearly linear expansion of subscriber/session capacity
• Up to 20,000 transactions/second per active core (an application layer request/response exchange is considered a transaction)

Performance can be impacted by:

• the number of messages required for each call
• the amount of subscriber data required for each message
• the number of features enabled
• the cache structure/size
• the memory bus and I/O throughput
• the number of CPU cores and CPU clock speed

Capacity is largely based on the amount of available memory and can also be impacted by the configuration.

Example Platform

Benchmarks are collected from the following server configuration:

• Dell R610
  • 2 6-Core Intel Xeon X5670 @ 2.93GHz
  • 96GB Memory (12x8GB), 1333MHz Dual Rank
• Ubuntu 11.10 x86_64 Server Edition

dsTest is designed to run on a wide variety of computer platforms, allowing you to invest in the hardware that best suits your needs. The highly-threaded software architecture is designed to efficiently utilize multi-core and 64-bit CPUs.

• Software-based solution can be installed on rack-mounted servers or portable computers
• Remote monitoring and control via command line interface
• Configure test scenarios with XML files that are validated against a published XML Schema to avoid invalid definitions
• Published server control interface (XML/TCP) to allow development of remote automated control
• Rich set of operational measurements, collected at customizable intervals and stored in an SQLite database on the server, facilitate test analysis, troubleshooting, and fine-tuning. Real-time measurements may be retrieved through the CLI interface or graphed via the GUI interface.