Introduction

The PTAnalyzer system is a distributed probe based E2E (end-to-end) Service Performance Management, QoS measurement and SLA supervision system. The network under supervision is continuously monitored to determine if the network has the ability to deliver the required degree of QoS performance at any time, for any service, from an end-user's perspective as well as from the network's point of view.

The PTAnalyzer system's primarily method to supervise a network is by injecting tiny (in respect to bandwidth and frame rate) E2E measurement streams into the network under test. The injected measurement streams will, in the same way as for 'real' payload traffic, be affected by the network when transported from the source to the destination. The network's delivered QoS performance can be measured by analyzing the measurement streams upon reception and by correlating the results from several measurement streams.

The figure below depicts an active E2E measurement stream injected into a network. The network under test could be seen as a black-box and the measurement stream is used to determine the black-box's QoS performance.

The measured QoS performance of the black-box can then be used to determine if a specific service/application (e.g. VoIP, IPTV, Gaming, WWW, etc) would functioning properly or mis-behave by analyzing the result in respect to the QoS requirements (delay, jitter, packet-loss, reachability, uptime, etc) associated with the specific service/application.

Moreover, the PTAnalyzer system provides a complete set of different measurement test types, both active and passive measurement, using unicast or multicast addressing and a variety of configurable traffic types and payloads.

The PTAnalyzer system may be setup to run in full-scale supervision mode or as a stand-alone measurement tool. Full-scale supervision mode is intended for network and services supervision for operators and enterprises, while stand-alone mode is intended and suitable for, installation and deployment services, base-lining, last-mile test and verification and consultancy services, such as VoIP assessments.

The stand-alone system does not include the Supervision Domain Server (SDC), which is the key component in the supervision system. All other components (probes, reflectors and client) are reusable and could be used in both system types.

The PTAnalyzer system provides a complete supervision platform, which enable perceptive measure and supervision to be able to state a network's ability to deliver the required degree of QoS from a network as well as an users point of view, i.e. the PTAnalyzer is a network measurement and supervision system and the system is service/application aware.

This paper will give the reader an introduction to the PTAnalyzer system, the components within the system and an overview of the system architecture. This introduction will focus on the full-scale supervision system, but will also apply to the stand-alone measurement system.