Agilent Offers Pair of IP Conformance Tools

California-based Agilent Technologies (www.agilent.com) introduced a pair of tools for automating the testing of protocols used to deliver services over IP networks. The two new conformance suites allow customers to speed development and interoperability of voice over IP (VoIP) and IP virtual private network (IP-VPN) equipment by ensuring that control-plane software implementations suit key IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standards.

Agilent says one of the tools is the industry’s first conformance suite for the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), an application-layer signaling protocol that provides call control for IP phone calls, multi-party sessions or multimedia distribution. The Agilent SIP Conformance Suite, the company’s initial VoIP suite, includes more than 200 automated test scenarios covering different aspects of the protocol and can be used for testing all SIP-system components, including SIP telephones and proxy servers, from both the network and the user side.

Agilent’s IP-VPN Conformance Test Suite provides comprehensive testing of key protocols used to establish on-demand VPN connections across the Internet. Designed for use by equipment manufacturers and service providers, the application offers fully automated stimulus-response testing of all aspects of the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP), including control connection establishment, session establishment and data transport.

Both suites use a clear “pass/fail” paradigm to report overall results and provide engineers with analysis and debugging tools to identify failures and their causes, or conflicts with published standards.

The suites, priced at $11,310 each, are available on Agilent’s QA Robot routing protocol test solution and complement other Agilent tools for testing IP routing protocols (BGP-4, OSPF, IS-IS), Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS), evaluating IP impairments, and generating and analyzing TCP and UDP traffic.

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