IP DiffServ Conformance Test Suites

Part Number 802111 - IP Differentiated Service Conformance Test Suite

The IP Differentiated Services (DiffServ) test suite tests the conformance and performance of IP equipment that provides a defined quality of service for certain classes of data, which are differentiated by applying or a Per-Hop-Behavior (PHB) to packets. This test suite consists of:

• Conformance tests to assess compliance to the mandatory and optional features of Class Selector PHB according to RFC 2474 - Definition of the Differentiated Services Field (DS Field) in the Ipv4 and Ipv6 Headers and RFC 2475 - An Architecture for Differentiated Services. These tests assess the system using a variety of different methods to see if the system performs correctly, and test the systems:
  • Default behavior
  • If it performs properly when it receives undefined or illegal code-points
  • When heavily loaded with different classes of data
  • Ability to properly prioritize certain classes of data
  • And under many more scenarios
• Conformance tests to assess compliance to the mandatory and optional features of RFC 2598 - An Expedited Forwarding (EF) PHB.

  The expedited forwarding PHB is available so that IP based systems can guarantee that certain classes of data will always transit through a system with no packet loss, no matter what the systems current network load is. These test are useful in determining if a system is capable of carrying the kind of data, such as VoIP (Voice over IP), that would be normally be considered high priority.

• Conformance tests to assess compliance to the mandatory and optional features of RFC 2597 - Assured Forwarding (AF) PHB Group.

  These tests assess if the system behaves properly under a variety of different loads of AF traffic. The AF PHB group exits in order to allow the prioritization and categorization of a variety of different data streams. For example, in the AF group it would be possible go allow interactive applications to have a higher priority then web transactions.

• Performance tests designed to measure performance using metrics defined in RFC 1242 and RFC 2544 for given code-points. These metrics include:
  • Throughput
  • Latency
  • Frame loss rate
  • Ability to handle back-to-back frames

These additional specifications are used as reference by this test suite:

• RFC 2475, An Architecture for Differentiated Services
• RFC 2544, Benchmarking Terminology for Network Interconnect Devices
• RFC 1242, Benchmarking Terminology for Network Interconnection Devices