Empirix Tests Voice Bridging

BEDFORD, Mass. -- Empirix Inc., the industry's leading supplier of VoIP testing systems, today announced that multiple Hammer(TM) test platforms were used to verify the performance and interoperability of voice bridging and voice over wireless equipment in a multi-vendor test of enterprise "triple play" services, staged by the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL).

Hammer FX(TM) (functional), Hammer NXT(TM) (load), and Hammer Call Analyzer(TM) tools for testing voice traffic handling behavior were utilized as part of the March 21-25 UNH-IOL event, designed to simulate how voice, video and data would actually be deployed in a large wired and wireless corporate LAN, serving multiple offices on a distributed campus.

The Hammer NXT generated and terminated 24,000 VoIP calls as realistic simulated load through the wired network, while the Hammer FX analyzed the voice quality of calls generated and terminated across IEEE 802.1x wireless LANs. The Hammer Call Analyzer monitored, traced and reassembled multi-leg calls of Cisco SCCP/Skinny and SIP through the wired and wireless segments of the network.

The test bed included VoIP, VoIP-over-wireless, voice clients (software and hardware), session initiation protocol (SIP) proxies, PDAs, bridging protocols, call generation/termination, voice quality analysis, routers, multiple wireless access points, laptop, streaming media servers and a mix of security protocols.

"Using the Hammer system, we were able to characterize call capacity as well as the quality of calls using PESQ scoring for both the wired and wireless elements of the network", said Gordon Beith, senior product manager of Empirix. "The wired bridged network was shown to handle around 15,000 calls and the wireless network was shown to handle about twice the call capacity as had been previously demonstrated. The results of these tests were particularly interesting to participating WLAN vendors."

Empirix Inc.