Date: 08/03/2009

New VOIP testing solutions to emulate up to 1 million SIP and RTP based end points

Ixia has announced new VOIP test systems called IxLoad Voice matches with the capacity of modern media gateways and with a 1 million SIP- and RTP-based endpoints per chassis. Ixia's new Acceleron-XP load module implements voice protocols with hardware to reach these higher capacities.

IxLoad tests VoIP network components, including IP-based PBXs, softswitches, call managers, session border controllers, and media gateways, using realistic scenarios involving multiple voice protocols, complex calling sequences, and triple-play mixes of voice, video and data traffic. IxLoad's unique subscriber modeling emulates user communities that vary in service usage and timing. Ixia supports all of the essential VoIP signaling and transmission protocols, including SIP, RTP, SCCP, MGCP, H.323, and H.248 - with complex call flows and Class 5 features.

After many years of isolated, small-scale consumer and business roll-outs, VoIP deployments have finally gone mainstream. Infonetics Research forecasts a 25% compound aggregate growth in residential and SOHO hosted VoIP subscribers through 2011, when they are expected to number over 187 million. To meet this growing demand, network equipment manufacturers must deliver VoIP devices that can handle more calls and a complex array of protocols and services. Both network equipment manufacturers and converged service providers of all sizes need to verify the performance and interoperability of new VoIP devices and networks, ensuring that they can handle complex, heavy VoIP traffic loads.

"VoIP protocols and technology may be well understood, but there are a host of potential problems when a high number of calls are mixed with large volumes of data and video traffic," said Anupam Sahai, vice president of marketing at Ixia. "We developed our Acceleron-XP, VQM modules and IxLoad test application to emulate city-scale communities of real-world users - allowing our customers to discover and solve their device and network problems before their customers do."

IxLoad emulates and tests security and network infrastructure protocols, including IPSec, PPP, DHCP and multiple forms of authentication. Voice call security is also supported by SIP/TLS and SRTP. Ixia's VQM support module delivers real-time evaluation of end-user quality of experience (QoE), such as PESQ scores for 300 simultaneous calls - making it unnecessary to wait for time-consuming, post-test analysis.

"VoIP services have already been widely adopted by consumers and SOHOs, but we expect the next growth in adoption to come from SMBs." said Matthias Machowinski, analyst at Infonetics. "For them, service reliability and voice quality will be key buying criteria. With Ixia's new IxLoad Voice, service providers can comprehensively test their networks before they ramp up these high value subscribers, so that there are no surprises when subscribers are turned up."