Description

Spirent C2 WLAN 802.11AX Appliance

Spirent TestCenter supports the highest performing and most realistic wireless local area network (WLAN) multi-client emulation for direct functionality and performance testing of Access Points (APs) and end-to-end testing of WLAN ecosystems that include WLAN access controllers, and gateways. Spirent TestCenter C2 WLAN Appliance in a compact and portable, 2U appliance form factor combines Spirent’s industry-leading IEEE 802.11ax WLAN interface cards with Spirent IEEE 802.3bz BASE-T 100Mbps/1Gbps/2.5Gbps/5Gbps/10Gbps Ethernet card on a copper interface. Users can emulate a large number of realistic 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax WLAN clients to connect with an AP via a cabled conductive or over-the-air (OTA) link. The appliance has an internal hardware clock-based cross NICs timing aimed for an accurate latency measurement. Basic WLAN control plane and data plane features along with the advanced RFC style network traffic and throughput performance test cases are supported over the WLAN network involving the emulated clients and the APs under test.

The WLAN interfaces installed in the highly integrated C2 Appliance consist of multiple IEEE 802.11ax radios, providing maximum user configurability and flexibility to emulate various IEEE 802.11ax clients and other legacy 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac clients on either 2.4GHz or 5GHz band. The newly designed 802.11ax radio interface supports those exciting features such as MU-MIMO, OFDMA, longer symbol duration, BSS color, etc. introduced in 802.11ax standard. A single WLAN radio supports 802.11ax clients with different spatial stream configurations up to 8 spatial streams for the best realistic client emulation scenarios in either conductive or OTA mode. Designed for testing WLAN network infrastructure devices, the intended DUTs include the latest 802.11ax carrier or enterprise thin APs with controllers, consumer grade 802.11ax APs, and integrated broadband WLAN gateway with 802.11ax support. Spirent TestCenter WLAN solutions offer the best in class traffic generation and analysis for testing functionality, performance, and scalability.

Applications

• Conductive or OTA testing
• Multi-client WLAN network testing scenarios
• Functional, performance, and scalability testing
• Stability testing
• Security and authentication type testing
• AP interwork with legacy IEEE 802.11 mode clients
• Association processing and DHCP timing testing
• RFC2544 benchmark performance testing
• UDP stateless and TCP stateful traffic testing
• Application layer traffic testing
• 802.11ax feature testing
• Advanced features such as roaming, airtime fairness, band steering
• Easy rate vs range testing

Features & Benefits

• Utilize both the Ethernet and multiple WLAN cards installed in the appliance for emulating a very large number of realistic 802.11 WLAN clients with traffic generation and analysis
• Support 802.11 b/g/n/ac/ax on 2.4GHz and 802.11 a/n/ac/ ax on 5GHz frequency bands
• Support dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz concurrently
• Support up to 8×8 MIMO for 802.11 n/ac/ax on 5GHz and 4×4 MIMO for 802.11 n/ac/ax on 2.4GHz
• Support 20MHz and 40MHz channel bandwidths for clients on 2.4GHz band
• Support 20MHz, 40MHz, 80MHz, and 80+80Mhz, and 160MHz channel bandwidths for clients on 5GHz band
• Support 802.11ac/ax with 80 MHz channel bandwidth for MIMO up to 8×8 on 5GHz
• Support 802.11ac/ax with 80+80 MHz and 160MHz channel bandwidth for MIMO up to 4×4 on 5GHz
• Internal channel attenuation up to 63.5dB for both TX and RX with 0.25dB resolution for each of individual spatial stream completely independently
• 802.11ac/ax explicit transmit beamforming (TxBF) and legacy implicit TxBF for beamformee
• Switchable between SU-MIMO and MU-MIMO configurations
• Support various 802.11ac/ax client configurations for MUMIMO grouping testing
• OFDMA RU management testing with multiple OFDMA capable clients
• Support different BSS color settings with a threshold of 0 to 64
• Support 802.11ax PHY features such as long training field; HE duration-based RTS; dual-carrier modulation
• Support various channel selection plan for different geographic regions globally
• Maximally interoperable with various chipset vendor’s WLAN AP products
• Best in class realistic traffic generation and analysis over WLAN and Ethernet interfaces
• Capable of providing multiple traffic flows per client with each flow offering stateful traffic at layers 2 through 7
• Capable of generating realistic and stateful WLAN client traffic individually on per client basis
• Support individually controlled client behavior providing accurate control of 802.11, 802.3, and IP characteristics, including medium access control, authentication and encryption, frame size, and rate
• Emulate client association mode in either a designated sequential or more realistic random fashion
• Support various RFC2544 style test case for throughput benchmark performance testing
• Each emulated client supports the full MAC per 802.11 standard independently
• Upper layer protocols (e.g., DHCP and TCP) are fully supported using independent protocol tasks
• Test AP’s data plane performance using flow packets of different sizes, protocol types, encryptions, and rates
• 802.3 Ethernet transmit capability: wire-speed hardware packet generation with timestamps, sequence numbers, data integrity signature, and flow group Identifier
• 802.3 Ethernet receive capability: wire-speed packet filtering, data integrity, and sequence checking, capture, real-time latency measurement on each flow
• Support different 802.3 Ethernet packet length control functionalities including fixed, increment, decrement by user-defined step or automatic, list, random and shuffle
• Support a sniffer type IEEE 802.11 packet over-the-medium capture for a real-time Wireshark display or other precise post processing
• Simultaneously 802.3 packet capture and 802.11 packet capture up to 256mb per port, respectively
• Filter options with specific types of packets (e.g. SSIDs, BSSIDs, etc.) for reducing capture file size or for a longer capture
• Extensive 802.11 stats, counters, and statistics report in either real-time or periodically on per client or per port basis
• Support 802.3 and 802.11 real-time port statistics, per flow statistics, and port-level histogram
• Support per spatial stream statistics and counter
• Support per card reservation for WLAN cards and per port reservation for the Ethernet ports
• Switch to different channel on 5GHz band requested by the AP without interruption of traffic