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There are two views of the same network. One of them is from the user’s point of view and the other one of engineers. Usually users have some basic understandings of data transmission principle, while network engineers manage all the underlying  processes. For a user transmission parameters do not matter. The main things the user wants to know are whether the data transmission is fast and reliable enough or not. In contrary a network engineer or adminitrator should be well-informed with all detailed characteristics. To increase the quality and reliability of data transmission a lot of engineers’ groups develop protocols to improve data transmission. And they need some special tools for analysis and evaluation of the data transmission parameters. Only a deep understanding of the traffic behaviour can give the ability to clarify the characteristics of a new protocol on a network, to debug any appeared issues and present high-quality (well-engineered network) product for end-user.
With such an idea in mind LTest had been developed. LTest is a free Linux tool for analysis of network quality metrics based on the patented Improved Cristian algorithm with linear time interpolation. It shows how fast a network is. LTest tool visualizes data of traffic profile at a very fine grain – down to hundreds of nanoseconds. This feature makes work with the program easy and quick. In few minutes engineer can look through the whole picture of the transmission data in the path and immediately look deeply to the most interesting parts. To understand which concrete benefits user directly gets from the LTest usage let’s first of all answer the main question: What is the LTest tool?

DrawingLTest is:

  • Access to the behaviour of each packet on the network. It means that graphical representation of the transmitted data gives ability to get the whole picture of the signal as well as look deeply into behaviour of every single packet of a data stream.
  • Time measurements with nanosecond resolution (using custom HPTimer library for Linux time retrieve). The measurements are done in the high-resolution quality that gives ability to analyse the parameters in very precise way
  • Internal system clock synchronization mechanism. For measuring one way delay or other time-based parameters between different hosts a time synchronization is critical. Because of this fact Ltest tool needs to support synchronization mechanism
  • Different traffic sources models: CBR(time constant resource), Poisson model, FIFO
  • Full discrete traffic profile for up to 10 Gbps traffic
  • User-friendly web interface

Thus, it can be concluded that LTest tool is the one free engineering tool that gives the ability to measure one-way delay parameter and graphically represent the dependence of packets parameters.
At the moment, LTest product is ready for use. 

Project site: LTest

Project manager – Eduard Simens