Scenario
Once used mainly for low-priority data, today’s Wi-Fi networks carry real-time, multimedia traffic in consumer, service provider, and enterprise network environments worldwide. Mobile clients continue to grow in both numbers and complexity of application usage, with Wi-Fi supporting voice, video, unified messaging, medical patient monitoring, pubic hotspots, cloud-based services, and the offload of real-time data transactions from over-taxed cellular networks.
With Wi-Fi evolving from a "nice to have" to a primary network medium, poor performance now places brand reputation, profitability models, customer satisfaction, and even lives at risk. Today's wireless LANs (WLANs), Wi-Fienabled devices, and mobile applications must deliver unprecedented quality, reliability, and security—without fail—to mitigate these risks and fully leverage mobility. Wi-Fi needs to become "carrier grade."
Each critical component of the dynamic WLAN ecosystem must be tested, assessed, and optimized throughout the product or service lifecycle:
- Enterprise and service provider access points (APs)
- WLAN controllers
- Wi-Fi-enabled client devices (laptops, smartphones, printers, scanners, healthcare monitors, etc.)
- Live deployed WLANs and future upgrades
Equipment manufacturers, service providers, and users alike need actionable insight into performance if they’re to thrive in today’s highly competitive market. This means validating:
- Mobility: performance while roaming from and between APs
- Interoperability with other clients and WLAN infrastructure equipment
- Performance /Quality of Experience (QoE) from the end-user perspective
- Scalability
Assessments should begin by obtaining baseline performance measurements and progress to load testing to simulate realistic live network environments. The quality of the user experience should be measured in metrics relevant to each individual application—voice, data, video, etc.—in the presence of diverse client and traffic mixes.
Wi-Fi continues to evolve to meet demand. Next-generation 802.11ac-compliant infrastructures are emerging, promising much higher speeds and capacities. To fully leverage this integral technology into the future, product roadmaps, site assessments, and performance optimization strategies must encompass 802.11ac and even more dramatic change.
Ixia Solutions
The industry’s premier Wi-Fi test solution, Ixia’s IxVeriWave represents the gold standard in evaluating Wi-Fi performance and site readiness. The world’s leading WLAN infrastructure and mobile device manufacturers, service providers, system integrators, and enterprises use IxVeriWave to measure and optimize performance, reliability, and scalability throughout the product/service lifecycle.
Employing a client-centric, user-focused model, IxVeriWave delivers:
- A lab-to-field solution addressing the needs of product design, development, and deployment in live networks. IxVeriWave enables real-world deployments to be reproduced in test and QA labs, and powerful site assessments and “what if” testing to be conducted in live production networks
- Traffic generation for emulating realistic network and environmental conditions and simulating variables such as distance, roaming, and interference
- Test automation allowing hundreds of tests to be run and repeated quickly, unattended
- Performance analysis used to assess QoE, interoperability, and scalability, and rapidly pinpoint and remediate potential problem areas
- Breakthrough site assessment that eclipses traditional site “surveys” to measure a facility’s true readiness for mobility, inform vendor selection and network design, and assess future changes
- Testing as a Service (TaaS) evaluations by veteran Wi-Fi test experts
IxVeriWave validates the maximum performance for WLAN networks, devices, and applications in the real world and helps gauge the impact of ongoing changes. A wide array of load modules and test suites address specific assessment needs such as:
- QoE from the end-user perspective
- Client interoperability
- VoIP QoS
- Large-scale roaming
- SDTV/HDTV wireless video
- Dynamic Frequency selection (DFS) compliance
- Industry-specific deployment scenarios: healthcare, retail, education, etc.
Ixia test systems and services deliver the powerful analytics needed to harden new product designs, reduce time to market, and speed identification of potential issues. Major business benefits include:
- Improved product quality
- Increased efficiency and reduced test costs
- Expanded test coverage with repeatable, large-scale, real-world test scenarios impossible to create by other means
- Successful product launches and deployments out of the gate
IxVeriWave is used throughout the WLAN ecosystem to test 802.11n and legacy access points, and controllers, and mobile devices. Ixia also leads the industry with innovative and comprehensive 802.11ac test solutions needed to make next-generation Wi-Fi networks a reality.