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EANTC's multi-vendor interoperability showcase is a well-established event, providing an ecosystem to conduct testing in the most advanced application scenarios to address 5G network evolution and service provider needs. This year’s event took place March 2-13 at the EANTC offices in Berlin. As in previous years, Spirent participated alongside more than 100 attendees and 16 vendors in the showcase featuring the latest networking
For the first time participants from all around the world had the opportunity to join EANTC’s test sessions remotely (including some of our colleagues from Spirent) to help maximize the event’s success during the unfolding global health crisis.
Since MPLS + SDN + NFV World Congress has been postponed, EANTC has decided to release the white paper documenting the multi-vendor interoperability test results ahead of a live showcase.
Addressing Evolving Test Requirements
As a test equipment vendor, Spirent provided support by generating and measuring traffic to help verify it was forwarded through vendor networks correctly and as expected. Spirent team also helped emulate and analyze control management protocols for networking technologies like EVPN, Segment Routing and SRv6.
For EVPN testing, Spirent was successfully involved in multiple test scenarios, providing single-homed PE (protocol endpoint) emulation for symmetric and asymmetric Integrated Routing and Bridging (IRB), MAC mobility, IGMP proxy and carrier Ethernet services, including E-Line services (point-to-point) and Flexible Cross-Connect testing. Spirent also offered a new test for IGMP Proxy functionality for the first time to address recent developments in EVPN multicast optimization.
For Segment Routing testing, Spirent took part as PE in L3VPN for IPv4/IPv6 services over MPLS-based segment routing and in Multi-Topology scenario for EVPN and L3VPN over SRv6 Data Plane. Acting as protocol endpoint and at the same time providing traffic flows enabled participating vendors to verify everything worked as expected. Spirent TestCenter ports provided capture functionality to help identify and resolve interoperability issues of any routing device or network quickly as well as ensure compliance to the latest standards.
The Importance of Testing
Standards provide a consensus as to how a technology should work and interconnect with adjacent layers, components, interfaces, or services. There are often some grey areas in the interpretation of standards during implementation into products and services, interoperability tests like this EANTC organized showcase play a major role in helping to resolve them and are thus important to the evolution of the entire industry.
Learn more about Spirent TestCenter Platform and Spirent’s protocol emulation capabilities.
Results and lessons from EANTC’s Multi-Vendor Interoperability Event (March 2020)
