Maxwell Capabilities: A More Detailed View

Plug into Maxwell’s powerful network emulation capabilities

When it comes to improving device performance in challenging conditions, there’s never been anything like Maxwell to accurately emulate networks under adverse conditions.

Design and code reviews can only contribute so much to a product’s reliability. Eventually, the device needs to be exposed to near-real-world network traffic to see how it performs. Unfortunately, older methods of testing network devices—such as traffic generators, network emulators, and network simulators from the 1990’s — are too “coarse-gained”. They only operate at the packet level and are limited to packet operations like drop/lose, duplicate, delay, jitter and re-order.

Maxwell’s network Emulation capabilities provide much finer grained control.

Maxwell provides network, protocol, and packet level impairments, for real-world network emulations in the lab. These capabilities are imperative for realistic testing of network-based applications and devices:

• At the network level, Maxwell can introduce standard, custom, coupled, and combinatorial network impairments.
• At the protocol level, Maxwell can intercept and change the characteristics of the protocol based on criteria, other network flows and other events.
• At the packet level, Maxwell can intercept and modify packet contents based on various conditions and events.

All of these capabilities can be usefully employed to accurately produce network simulations in the lab approximating real-world network conditions.

Historically, network devices were tested with primitive network impairment systems operating only on the packet as a whole. These systems could drop/lose, delay, duplicate, and/or re-order packets. That was all.

Today’s customers expect far greater granularity when emulating real-world networks. They expect that the real-world network they emulate in the lab will allow them to:

• Initiate multiple concurrent network flows through the device under test, because real-world networks operate with multiple concurrrent network flows.
• Introduce packet, protocol, and payload impairments, not just packet impairments, because real-world networks operate with impaired protocols and payloads, not just packets.

Maxwell is designed from the ground up to help test engineers discover problems earlier, fix them, and release higher-quality products and applications. Its flexible, scriptable, programmable power enables an abundance of capabilities:

With Maxwell, product implementations can be tested in near-real-life conditions ranging from routine to extreme prior to release or large-scale deployment.

Find problems before anyone else does