A Whole New Testing Ballgame

Maybe because it was fall and the World Series was in the air, but something led Mu Dynamics' Adam Stein to pull out a baseball analogy to describe the state of next-generation network testing.

According to Stein, vice president of marketing for Mu, service providers are somewhere between first and second base (that's still fairly early for you baseball neophytes) in rolling out commercial NGN and IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) networks — and thus also just out of the box in requiring full NGN test capabilities.

Meanwhile, vendors — including both test-equipment makers and NGN infrastructure dealers — lag a bit behind that but are eager to get moving; picture them standing on first base but taking a solid leadoff. In turn, tests and demos — such as the IMS Forum Plugfests and MultiService Forum global interoperability events — are a little ahead of the operators, having helped to prove the viability and interoperability of key NGN specifications and interfaces.

But they also have presented some big testing challenges for vendors. And with NGN/IMS deployments lagging, many test vendors haven't yet ramped up to full-speed production on NGN test gear, especially solutions that can put a network through all the paces that an all-IP, service-rich NGN architecture can offer.

“The issue is that on a live next-generation network, we've advanced far beyond the old TDM world and even far beyond basic [NGN or IMS] interoperability testing,” Stein said. “Testing a true NGN forces you not only to test the network, but higher up the OSI stack into the service layer, including how multiple services interact and especially how the network reacts when it faces an unexpected condition,” such as, for example, a non-standard implementation of session initiation protocol (SIP), one of the key — yet also complex — NGN protocols.

“The main issue in testing is complexity,” Stein said. “You have all these different vendors with new types of elements added to the network, plus all of these new and different services potentially added on both the consumer and business sides.”