PORTLAND, OR — February 14, 2006 — VeriWave, Inc., the leading provider of test systems for performance analysis of wireless local area network (WLAN) products, announced today the introduction of the WaveTest 90, a test platform designed to validate the performance of enterprise class Wireless LAN systems, that brings tremendous cost savings to developers and users of WLAN networks.
The WaveTest 90 is a performance analysis system designed for use in the development, QA, production, and deployment of large scale, enterprise-class wireless LAN systems, that consist of tens of Access Points (APs) and multiple Wireless LAN switches. It emulates the behavior of thousands of independent WLAN clients, and validates critical network metrics such as the network capacity, its ability to handle mobile and roaming clients, security, and Quality of Service (QoS).
“To complement development activities for LVL7’s innovative FASTPATH WLAN software, we needed a next-generation test system that could automate a rigorous verification process with both accuracy and scalability”, said Steve Ledford, Director of Wireless Development for LVL7 Systems, “The WaveTest 90 from VeriWave matched our needs well, allowing us to conduct large-scale performance and roaming tests using a variety of security schemes. This enhanced capability improves our own time-to-market and quality, and enables LVL7 to accelerate wireless and wireline convergence in the Ethernet switching marketplace.”
Wireless is rapidly entering the enterprise space to become an integral part of corporate grade networks. For Wireless LANs to be fully adopted as part of mission critical corporate infrastructure, they must guarantee secure, consistent, and reliable performance. Testing of wireless LANs has been limited to small scale, non-repeatable, environments. Dependency on off-the-shelf clients, including reference design chip-sets, and handsets, limited testing of these network devices to a minimal set of inaccurate metrics and caused performance surprises when these networks are actually deployed. VeriWave’s WaveTest 90 takes the guesswork out of large scale, corporate grade, multi-user network testing, while reliably and repeatably measuring how the wireless network will handle a multitude of applications including voice, video and data.
“As the scope, scale, and complexity of wireless LANs continue to grow, a comprehensive WLAN testing and evaluation environment is critical to component designers, product manufacturers, and enterprise users alike,” said Craig Mathias, a Principal with the mobile and wireless advisory firm Farpoint Group. “The precise client traffic generation, scalable roaming emulation, and ability to simulate and test very large configurations featured in VeriWave’s new WaveTest 90 are essential capabilities for all of these constituencies.”
“In the early days of Local Area Networks (LANs), I performed hundreds of benchmarking tests to provide a standardized means of comparing equipment from different vendors, to enable customers to verify manufacturers' claims of equipment capability, and to force the vendors to live up to their own performance promises.”, said Scott Bradner, Senior Technical Consultant at Harvard University. “This type of testing was critical to acceptance of LANs as the backbone of corporate networking. With today's WLANs, the basic concepts remain, but measurement methodologies have had to change to deal with issues stemming from the use of wireless as a shared medium. VeriWave's WaveTest 90 extends the types of crucial performance related metrics, such as latency, loss, and throughout tests, that I performed on LAN and WAN devices to the WLAN world, with accuracy and repeatability. These metrics can have a major effect on the end-user experience, yet they are hard to obtain in the presence wireless constraints such as collisions, random backoffs, high error rates, variable transmission power, and constant client mobility. VeriWave's design addresses those issues and offers the first platform that I know of that is capable of accurately obtaining these measurements."
At the heart of the WaveTest 90 reside independent WaveBlades, each capable of simultaneous emulation and analysis of hundreds of clients. Each of the emulated clients carries a unique context and behavior, allowing the user complete control over power, medium access (MAC) protocol, type and scheduling of traffic. The WaveBlade sophisticated traffic scheduler guarantees that the simulated network traffic will emulate a real-life network supporting up to hundreds of mobile users accessing the network.
About VeriWave
