Fantastic Features – RFC6349

More than 85% of today’s Internet traffic is based on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) packets and it is used for a large amount of different traffic types such as video-on-demand, web traffic, machine-to-machine, data centre, cloud and various types of signalling. As more and more critical business applications are moved to the cloud, the importance of TCP is growing even further.

The success of TCP comes from its capability to guarantee the delivery of any packets sent between two computers and its ability to adjust the throughput according to the available bandwidth in the network. However, TCP is a complex protocol and packet drops in the network or misconfigured routers may severely impair TCP traffic performance. Since majority of both consumer and enterprise services are TCP based, tuning the network for optimal TCP performance is important for service providers across all services.

The IETF specified RFC6349 is a methodology that helps the service provider to optimize their network for TCP traffic and hence maximise the performance of a broad set of applications. It defines how to test sustaining TCP performance on the network and measure how well multiple parallel TCP streams are performing with the current network configurations.

The test can be performed for multiple service classes at once and thus a combination of voice, video, data and control traffic can be validated with the same test and for multiple simultaneous flows. Based on the results, the network configurations can be modified in order to obtain optimal performance. RFC6349 is also well applicable for Service Acceptance Testing scenarios to validate the TCP performance and correct any potential issues before the service is turned on. In addition, the test can be used to verify performance of intermediate devices, such as stateful firewalls that may degrade the performance of the TCP traffic. Based on our experience it is not uncommon these devices along the route

The Creanord PULSure™ solution is designed for centralized service testing throughout the entire service lifecycle with a suite of tools and test types with both Service Acceptance Testing as well as active, continuous real-time testing. The PULSure solution comes with a Creanord implementation of RFC6349, which is more than a full-featured implementation of RFC6349. Creanord implementation enables testing millions of TCP streams simultaneously via 10G or even 100G interfaces to push the network to its limits. In addition, the service provider can truly use it for TCP optimization thanks to the augmented configuration options to vary window and segment sizes. PULSure solution offers a cost-effective way not only to test the end-to-end TCP connection performance but also to test segments against intermediate devices, which often are discovered as bottlenecks for TCP performance. Tests can be initiated from a centralized location with the PULSure management tools or automated through the north-bound RESTCONF API. The test configurations and results are stored centrally in the PULScore with great visualizations, easy results sharing and for quick re-run tests according to previous configurations. Check out this video to see how Creanord helps you reach maximum efficiency and throughput for your customers TCP traffic with RFC6349.