dsTest Plaform | Lab and Performance Testing

Lab & Performance Testing
with dsTest

Establish the network's behavior, performance, and capacity prior to deployment

From lab to live network testing

Designed explicitly for network equipment manufacturers and service providers to reduce the time to market of new services while ensuring the network quality and performance requirements are not compromised, Mobileum dsTest facilitates the cost-effective testing of high-performance protocols and applications.

Mobileum's dsTest is focused on 3G/4G/5G core network service interfaces to enable end-to-end network evolution testing. By selecting the interfaces required to accomplish your testing goals, a network element is surrounded by client simulators that simulate client activity. You can also provision a server emulator with the interfaces necessary to support testing, or test agents and proxies using both client simulation and server emulation. Our tool allows you to test your 5G, LTE, EPC, eMBMS, SMS, WLAN Offload, VoLTE, and CIoT networks or gather Big Data to support the identification of patterns that will provide new business opportunities, revenues, and efficiencies to network operations.

Simplified testing for multiple interface applications

Mobileum’s dsTest has significantly simplified the testing of the core packet network while still giving the flexibility to create complex scenarios that span multiple interface applications without writing a single script. You can quickly verify the capabilities of your network elements, without having advanced protocol knowledge, because our interface applications implement the procedures defined in the applicable standards. Moreover, our comprehensive measurements and reporting feature highlight problem areas.

Our client simulators allow you to test your server network elements’ capacity and performance, while the server node emulators provide network services for your testbed. You can also surround systems under test with a mix of client simulators and server emulators to provide full interface test coverage.

mobileum interface applications and network node emulators

Smarter reporting for extensive measurements

Mobileum’s dsTest produces an extensive and comprehensive set of operational measurements (OMs) with insights into your test’s progress or to diagnose the root cause of failures. Measurements are collected at configurable intervals of 1 second or longer and are written to an SQLite database. Reporting features range from sampling snapshot OM values using our dsClient Terminals command-line interface to the rich reporting features found in the dsClient Desktop. You can view charts or tabular reports while the test is running or after completion. Our SmartReport feature along with your customized pass/fail criteria allows you to see whether the test was a success. Our SmartReport’s statistical analysis and troubleshooting capabilities identify difficult performance issues. To aid in automated testing, the dsClient Desktop can write the information from SmartReport’s dashboard to an HTML file using your customized template.

TSAR for automated lab testing

To ease the integration of dsTest into a CI/CD/CT automat-ed test environment Mobileum offers an extension package to dsTest called TSAR (Test, Scheduling, Automation, and Reporting), which provides a mediation layer between pipeline tools and dsTest.

TSAR and dsTest facilitate the cost-effective testing of network changes and upgrades, by considerably reducing the time and complexity in the testing process with far fewer API calls to carry out complex test suites and providing accurate detection of anomalies and weaknesses while requiring fewer resources to operate and drive repeatable validation.

5GC NF validation in a containerized environment

Mobileum’s dsTest is a pure software platform designed for cloud-based services such as VMs, AWS, Containers/Docker, and Bare Metal. When operating in a docker container, it communicates with a service mesh in a 5G cloud environment, enabling operators to develop many automated SCP functional tests, including key features such as Ingress rate limiting, Egress Rate limiting, Circuit Breaker, Outlier Detection and Overload controls, by using dsTest as the traffic source and/or destination.

Our platform allows users to build scripts to match call flows with customized headers to generate sufficient SBI traffic for successful automated SCP feature testing. Users can also easily edit and modify scripts. The ability to add, modify, and remove HTTP2 SBI headers is particularly helpful when working through various service mesh configurations when not all of them are fully known and understood at the outset.

Capture the packets without missing a beat

Mobileum’s dsTest’s Packet Capture feature allows you to capture all incoming and outgoing traffic during your test without missing a beat. Apply filtering by protocol, port, or connection to capture only a portion of the traffic. As with the reporting features, you can use dsClient Desktop to stream the live capture to your Wireshark application while the test is running or download the capture and view it after the test is completed.

Protocol dictionaries to cover message handling and reference guides

Mobileum’s dsTest provides a set of reference guides to aid in your testing, including dictionaries for the control plane protocols used in 3GPP 3G, 4G, and 5G core networks. Each dictionary, prepared from standards specifications, presents a hierarchical view of the protocol from the application, procedure, or service level through the associated message definitions and down to the components (AVPs, IEs, attributes, or JSON structures) required or allowed in each message.

Our protocol dictionaries can be used for more than reference materials. dsTest can be configured to validate all incoming messages against the base dictionary, ensuring compliance with the applicable specifications. You can also define custom dictionaries for use in your tests to validate expected values in the message content, including dynamic values drawn from the subscriber database.

protocol dictionaries for message handling and reference guides

Lab & Performance Testing

Assured network behavior, performance, and capacity prior to deployment

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Subscriber database as the keystone to tests

dsTest's Subscriber Database is provisioned with all the information associated with mobile subscribers. Each node emulator may be configured with its own database, but the true power of the database is realized when it is shared among multiple nodes. In the latter case, the subscriber information is shared among nodes and the information learned through the transaction processing becomes available to another application.

The common information for many subscribers is stored in subscriber profiles: subscription, policy, and charging, IMS, SMS, or UE capabilities, etc. Subscribers arranged in groups define the unique information for each subscriber (identities and authentication keys) and to a particular subscriber’s current state, such as location information or serving gateway. Subscriber groups are then associated with the profiles that pertain to the interface applications in the test. Profile assignments may also be changed during the test to simulate subscription or policy changes.

SmartProfile feature for the maximum test scenario control

Mobileum’s SmartProfile gives you maximum control over your test scenario by altering the behavior of interface applications, altering, or validating message content, simulating network latency, or defining explicit message flows for select protocols.

SmartEvents: a programmable state machine that operates independently for each subscriber to alter application behavior, coordinate behavior across multiple interface applications, randomize subscriber actions, or validate the content of messages.
SmartMonitor: Trace a subscriber’s journey through your SmartEvents state machine while the test is running and get real-time feedback on all subscribers' current positions.
SmartMessageElement: Used in conjunction with SmartEvents to alter message content, thus adding vendor-specific AVPs, or performing negative testing.
SmartFlow/ServiceFlow: define explicit message flows for select protocols, each with a programmable state machine that can also interact with SmartEvents.

6 key capabilities of Mobileum’s
Lab & Performance testing

Applications and Interfaces

Supported applications and interfaces can be mixed to create different testing scenarios with emulated and real network nodes.

Interactive subscriber database

Monitor, modify, trigger any subscriber in the DB, change subscriber policies, APN, events.

Scalable and build
for performance

Supports hundreds of millions of simulated subscribers. Supports up to one million simulated gNBs within a single instance.

Continuous
monitoring

Log subscriber actions continuously or only on error and capture real-time events.

Fully
automated

Lab Core Network test interfaces can be fully automated, e.g with SITE Automation Framework, using REST or XML APIs or CLI.

High-Performance Packet capture

Capture all incoming and outgoing packets at rates exceeding 200,000 packets per second.

Leveraging other products in our Portfolio

5G Performance Testing

5G was specifically designed to meet IoT needs, whereas 2G, 3G, and 4G were never developed with IoT in mind. It brings two key attributes which neither NB-IoT nor LTE can deliver; they are: low latency and ultra-reliability. Know more about our 5G testing solutions and how they support IoT environments.

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Smartphone Experience

For the ongoing monitoring of communication service providers (CSP) customer's experience and continued end-to-end testing of your 5G services, Mobileum test automation supports flagship 5G smartphone performance when it comes to measuring, monitoring, and benchmarking network services and APP performance using 5G enabled devices.

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201209 mobileum card momo agent fraud assurance

Automation Framework

AF offers a set of tools that enable operators to automate manual testing and monitoring processes at all stages of the network lifecycle, from design to deployment and operations. It includes the capability to run variants of existing test cases (5G, IoT, voice, data, messaging, etc.) and offers keyword-driven scripting on top of a group of testing building blocks.

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See how Mobileum can help protect & grow your business

Over 900 Telecom companies, in more than 150 countries, are scaling their business with Mobileum solutions.

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dsTest Plaform | Lab and Performance Testing

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