Stateless Testing

Stateless testing is called ”Frame Blasting” within ByteBlower. This means that frames will be injected into the network. On the other side of the network, there is an interface that will listen to those packets. At the end of the test, the result will show the difference between the number of packets received, and the number of packets sent.

Although this seems a simple way of testing a device, it is very helpful. Most testing is done in this way, and most test plans will describe how you have to set up a test using Frame Blasting.

The reason for its success is that it will provide you with numbers. It will give you an exact result, which can be well reproduced. If you want to perform benchmarking, Frame Blasting is the way to go.

Frame Blasting is basically sending and receiving frames. Within ByteBlower, you will set up a Frame Blasting flow between two ByteBlower Ports. The first port will send the traffic, the second one will listen for this traffic. You will only need to configure the characteristics of the traffic. ByteBlower will do the hard part and configure both ports so that only this traffic will be shown in the results.

The result of a Frame Blasting flow will be the frame-loss rate. Using this frame-loss rate you can find the forwarding rate, etc., of the device under test.

Conclusion:

Stateless testing is the ideal solution for throughput testing. It will provide you concrete results which can be reproduced easily. Keep in mind that you cannot reproduce protocol transactions like TCP and that the result is therefore artificial.