Multimedia Performance Testing

Virtually all organizations today carry some level of Voice and video traffic on their data network.  However, even though this technology has been available for over a decade, network engineers are still struggling to understand, predict and control how well this multimedia traffic will behave over their network.  Due to the highly sensitive nature of this traffic to minor disruptions like jitter and delay, multimedia traffic control always ranks very highly on this list of major “pains” for any network manager.  This is made worse by the fact that users are typically much less tolerant of any minor voice or video disruptions than other traditional applications like email or web.

According to Gartner, approximately 85% of today’s networks will require upgrades to their data networks to properly support high-quality VoIP traffic. Voice traffic is uniquely time-sensitive, it cannot be queued, and if datagrams are lost the conversation is choppy or even incomprehensible. NAT-enabled firewalls, slow or congested links, or improperly implemented QoS schemes are just a few of the factors that can inhibit or even prevent VoIP traffic from crossing a data network in an acceptable form.

What network engineers need is a tool that can help them initially plan for new locations and links carrying multimedia traffic, as well as an on-going monitoring solution which can alert them to QoS degradation as it is happening so they can get ahead of the issue before their users start complaining.

NMSaaS offers a unique, low cost, very flexible solution to this issue.  By utilizing our simple to install agents, NMSaaS can be used to setup a point-to-point or fully meshed multi-point test of the quality of real multimedia transmissions.

These tests can be set up to fully mimic the live environment, including variable settings for:

• Codec
• # of parallel tests (streams)
• Class of service
• Duration of Test
• Media rate
• How often the test is run

The results of these tests provide the user with a full bi-directional understanding of the performance of their network as it relates to multimedia traffic.  Including such important data points like:

1. Packet Loss
2. Delay
3. Jitter
4. R Factor and MOS score

If you already have IPSLA enabled devices, NMSaaS can leverage that capability and also provide critical data points such as:

Cisco IP SLA UDP/Jitter

1. MOS Score
   
2. Busy
3. Error
4. Loss
5. Missing in action
6. Sequence errors
7. Late arrival

This information, combined with our ability to look deeply into the devices themselves that are carrying the traffic to report in interface errors, Queue drops, CPU and memory utilization and more also gives you the ability to quickly correlate QoS issues with other known network problems to rapidly identify and fix the root cause of the problem.