Bittester: Remote Reconfigurable Instrument For Network Testing

With the rapid development pace of Network Data Communication Equipment, demands for dedicated Network Performance Testing Instrument for these products testing are growing faster. However, the cost of this Performance Testing Instrument is too high for the small and medium-sized enterprises, research institutions to afford. Besides, those Performance Testing Instrument that had been delivered to users cannot carry out the expansion of hardware and software features.To solve those problems above, this paper designed and implemented a Remote Reconfigurable Supported Network Performance Testing Instrument based on NetFPGAlOG platform using Methodology of Reuse, and Software Defined Instrument (SDI) Technology, called BitTester. This BitTester has the ability to sending packet at up to40Gbps, packet filtering beyond the background of40Gbps network flow, using software to combine hareware function module for new testing area, and the feature of Remote Reconfigurable which made it possible for engineer from remote location of the network to unattended fresh the function of software or hardware of BitTester or even completely replaced without.Single interface performance comparion testing and entire system performance comparison testing with both dedicated Network Perfomance Testing Instrument of SmartBits from Spirent Corporation proved the effectiveness of the BitTester system and the BitTester system entire throughput is wider than SmartBits. The Remote Reconfigurable testing of BitTester which is a unique feature proved that updating or even replacing software or hardware function, structure is avaible for enineer from remote location in the network.The main innovation points of this paper include three items below:(1) Generating packets at up to40Gbps on a single FPGA chip;(2) Filtering packets with pattern matching beyond the background of40Gbps network flow on a sigle FPGA chip;(3) Using Software Define Instrument to expand new function;(4) Remote Reconfiguration feature based on network to updating or even totally replacement of software and hardware function and structure unattended.