Fabio Mustacchio, Andrea Di Pietro

IPTComm 2008 – Heidelberg, July 2th 2008

On the deployment of Network Processors in Operational and

Testing Network Devices

Objective

• Objective

• To show R&D activities on the development of high-performance, quickly-reconfigurable network devices oriented to operation and testing of convergent networks and based on different Intel IXP Network Processor platforms

Network Processors are extremely appealing components specifically designed for packet processing operations which, differently from the more expensive and rigid ASIC solutions, allow to be software programmed on a two-level hierarchy.

Elements

– Enhanced RTP Proxy (ERP): A RTP Proxy/media gateway developed on a IXP 2350 platform from ADI Engineering • Forwarding performance: UDP packets (66 bytes) up to over 2.9 millions

packets per second (no loss and a mean transit delay < 1 µs)

– BRUNO: a high-performance traffic generator, based on an Intel IXP 2400 board from Radisys

– TrafMon: a high-performance traffic sniffer composed of two elements:• A NP-Probe (developed on an Intel IXP 2400 board form Radisys)

responsible for packet classification and timestamping• A standard PC for traffic analysis

– VoIP Quality Tester: a tool for objective evaluation of speech quality (PESQ alghorithm) in VoIP calls developed using NetResults VoIP Toolkit

Testbed

Summary

• ERP is configured to act as RTP proxy on a predefined set of ports (ingress-output pairs)

• BRUNO load the ERP with RTP flows on such ports

• ERP performance are monitored by means of the TrafMon, which extracts the packets and transfers traces to a host PC

• VoIP calls are established by means of the VoIP Quality Tester and an automated evaluation of speech quality is performed