GL Communications (News - Alert) has enhanced its PacketExpert Ethernet/IP testing tool, which features WireSpeed Ethernet packet capture and playback applications.

 “PacketExpert is a portable (USB based) quad port Ethernet / VLAN / MPLS / IP / UDP (News - Alert) tester with 4 Electrical (10/100/1000 Mbps) and 2 Optical Ports (1000 Mbps),” explained Jagdish Vadalia, manager of product development at GL Communications, in a statement.

Each of the GigE ports is designed to deliver independent Ethernet/VLAN/MPLS/IP/UDP testing at WireSpeed. This serves the need of various applications including BERT, RFC 2544, IP link simulation and loopback.

The enhanced PacketExpert solution also features record/ playback features designed to support optical or electrical interfaces of up to 1 Gbps.  The solution includes WireSpeed packet filter, WireSpeed packet capture and aggregation and WireSpeed packet traffic generation.

Also the application offers support to WireSpeed filtering and capturing on multiple ports in addition to traffic aggregation. Traffic aggregation involves packets that are filtered from multiple ports which are then aggregated as a single stream and saved to a hard disk enabling offline analysis, explained officials.

“Timestamp precision for file capture/playback is increased from Microsecond to Nanosecond. Now captured file will have the timestamp recorded in nanosecond precision. While playing back the file, the nanosecond timestamp recorded in the file is maintained for each packet. For both, the accuracy is maintained within 10s of nanoseconds,” Vadalia said.

Officials explained that precise real world traffic conditions can be recreation in the lab using the playback feature. Users can set up complex capture scenarios with flexible filters. For example, users can filter a single VoIP call out of thousands, and capture traffic for that single VoIP call. While testing, real world burst and unpredictable background traffic can be generated and can be loaded on switches and routers when an actual test is running in the foreground.