Thilmee Baduge

Functional and Performance Verification of Overlay Multicast Applications - A Product Level Approach

In this paper we present a testbed for the functional and performance verification and validation of product level overlay multicast (or ALM in short) applications which is a complex task due to humongous test patterns. Structured, systematic and simplified test environment is vital for product level quality validation. The key features of this testbed are network emulation, automated test scenario execution, log collection and testbed/real environment interconnectivity. The testbed uses StarBED as its mother testbed and netem as the network emulator. The key contributions of this work are calibration of netem in term of network emulation and establishing an architecture to use netem and StarBED for ALM system verification. The calibration of netem was carried out up to 30 pipes (logical links) and the results show the network emulation can be done at maximum 1.2% packet loss. One of the simple ALM verification experiments executed on the testbed took only 43 hours for execution completion compared to human execution which would take 15 weeks.