Maxwell Pro Product Brief

Model Worst-Case Situations

•  Turn on burst mode for any impairment, to simulate back-to-back real-world stochastic bursts.

•  Add time-varying expressions to any parameter

Regardless of the production environment – anything from the routine to the extreme to legacy – Maxwell Pro permits customization to precisely emulate that world.

Incorporate Real or Simulated Traffic

Maxwell Pro accommodates all forms of real or simulated network traffic:

• Use real devices to generate packets, then impair only selected packets and protocols under consideration, while filtering out the rest.

• Or, use a packet generator to create simulated network traffic for the device under test, then apply impairments only to those packets, leaving the rest of the network unaffected.

Classify Network Traffic

Create filters for the packet classifier using the Classifier Filter Library, or create your own filter, then apply different impairments to different filter outputs.

Examples of filter criteria include:

• IEEE 802 header fields: MAC source/ destination addresses, Ethernet type/ length, MPLS criteria, VLAN tags.

• IPv4 or IPv6 header fields, including chained headers, fragment status, and QoS.

• Higher level protocols: UDP or TCP port numbers.

• Data within the payload, for any layer.

The Maxwell Pro Smart Classifier Filter System puts you in charge to use intelligent criteria for packet classification

• Specify flexible value/mask comparisons: useful for matching addresses, QoS criterion, and payload bytes.

• Specify lists of values and ranges for comparison: useful for port numbers, VLAN IDs, and payload sizes.

Add Time-Varying Impairments

Real-world networks change their behavior over time: excessive jitter, dropouts, or reductions in bandwidth can vary smoothly, or jump from one value to another, over the course of minutes, or days. Create a network emulation that varies the impairment parameters over any time period

Specify a time-varying expression for any metric, using equations, piecewise curves, or shaped pulses

Examples

• Test your streaming clients: The device under test should handle time-varying impairments, and perform flawlessly, for days.

• Run your protocols continuously, while the time-varying impairments cover all corner cases – perfect for overnight stress testing.

Maxwell Pro Charts and Tables

Monitor your Maxwell Pro network emulation from a Chrome web browser on your tablet or desktop computer, with the MPtable and MPchart applications

• MPtable provides a bird’s eye view of everything that is happening on the Maxwell Pro Network Emulator: Create tables, then expand the advanced tab to see metrics / statistics for all nodes in all flows. If a packet gets impaired anywhere in the network, you’ll see a change in the statistics, in real time.

• MPchart lets you drill down to see real-time graphs for a few selected statistics. Using linear or logarithmic axes, you can get a better sense of how metrics / impairments change over time. You can also display two metrics on the same graph to directly compare them.

Documentation

• Maxwell Pro Installation and Quickstart Guide

• Maxwell Application Programming Interface Guide

• Maxwell G.1050 Tests

• Maxwell Plugin Programmer’s Guide

• Maxwell Pro System Guide

Programmability

Customize Maxwell in one of five ways:

1. Use one of our existing scenarios as a base and make small modifications to tailor the impairments, as required.

2. Use the Maxwell graphical interface, select a set of desired impairments, save them, then define addresses and protocol filters.

3. Control Maxwell Pro from a Python, Perl, Java, shell script or another application using the Maxwell Control API Guide.

4. Create a plugin in C or C++. Plugins are the mechanism for creating programs in the Maxwell environment.

5. Custom tests can be added to the TCP/IP protocol test suites using the Python language.