CMC UNVEILS WI-FI TESTING TOOL FOR WLAN SYSTEMS.

Communication Machinery Corporation has launched its new EmulationEngine family of products with the release of EmulationEngine 11a. Innovation has come to WLAN testing. This is the industry's first Wi-Fi testing tool that enables testing of 802.11 protocol and WLAN system capacity through user control of multiple concurrent virtual stations (vSTA) from a single small-footprint emulator. Now quality assurance and network engineers can do load and capacity testing with up to 64 stations per emulator, authenticating and associating with a WLAN system, instead of testing with just a few stations and extrapolating from incomplete information.

"The EmulationEngine finally gives the designer, installer or supporter of Wireless LANs an effective way to do 'user-in-the-loop' traffic and load stress testing of their WLAN devices and systems," says Dave Swan, VP of sales and marketing for CMC. "Your Access Point and WLAN system will see 1 to 64 concurrent users, doing full 802.11 Authentication/Association and passing individual streams of IP traffic. Now you can actually test the capacity and scalability of your products using an emulated 'wireless user community' to load your products at the true user level."

The standard way of testing Wi-Fi capacity of Access Points and WLAN systems is through use of multiple PC's with 802.11 NIC cards. Today's tester has two choices using this approach:

1. Use 64 PC's and incur large capital expense, massive coordination issues, and complex integration of test data

2. Use just one or a couple of PC's and hope that the test results scale to larger numbers of users. Either choice is unacceptable.

Now, with the EmulationEngine, the engineer finally has an acceptable choice.

The EmulationEngine 11a allows the user to create up to 64 configurable, concurrent, Virtual Stations (vSTA) that emulate 802.11a Wireless Local Area Network stations. Each vSTA has a unique, user configurable, MAC and IP address allowing it to fully Authenticate, Associate, Deauthenticate and Disassociate as well as transmit and receive frames using IEEE 802.11a.

Test data traffic can be generated per individual concurrent vSTA and actively injected through these 802.11a vSTAs into AP and WLAN systems under test in two different modes: 1. Internal - traffic is generated internally by each vSTA as configurable Ping traffic; 2. External - Data is sourced from various industry standard third party load generators over 802.3 Ethernet, mapped to each vSTA by IP address, and forwarded over 802.11a to the WLAN device under test by the emulator.

Command, control and configuration of the emulator are via a Web-based user interface (Windows 2000/XP) or through Telnet and CLI (command line interface). Test configurations are established using EEScenario, which can be saved on the emulator or a PC for repeat testing or sharing of the test set-up. Each vSTA can be configured for WEP support for 64, 128, 152 bit, shared static keys.

The emulator allows the user to measure, monitor and capture key 802.11a statistics during a test from the following categories: Management Counters; Ping Statistics; Signal Quality Indication; Frame Counts; Error Statistics. The user interacts with vSTAs in real-time and can display selected statistics while a test is running. At the conclusion of a test the user may view and print test results in multiple reports, including a time stamped (microsecond) log of commands, responses and notifications directed at each vSTA during testing. Test results and data logs may be saved to memory in the emulator or to a PC in a comma-separated values (CSV) file for archiving or use in other reports and applications.

Price and Availability

The EmulationEngine 11a is shipping now from CMC and has a manufacturers list price of $4,700 US. Communication Machinery Corporation provides a suite of test and analysis products that are essential tools for the design, deployment and support of all 802.11 based products, appliances and Wireless LAN networks. CMC's EmulationEngine family enables stress and scalability testing through the use of multiple concurrent user-controlled virtual stations (vSTA) from a single 802.11 emulation platform.

Communication Machinery Corporation is located at 420 E. Gutierrez, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101.

Communication Machinery Corporation can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.cmc.com/.

For more information, call 805/879-1521.