By Yi Liang
The convergence of data, voice and video poses increased challenges for testing, as the network has to perform to the user’s expectations across different media types. The challenges in this area are two fold. One is to achieve a very high coverage of scenarios in a time, cost effective, and efficient manner. The other challenge is to achieve very high coverage of scenarios, the amount of equipment needed can grow to a point where it would be cost ineffective, or physically unfeasible to create sufficiently complex environments. Therefore it is important to build expertise in the following key areas:
- Automation
· Explore innovative and cost effective means of tying systems together to operate in a coordinated fashion to achieve test scenarios
· Leverage techniques of massively parallel programming and grid computing to achieve faster test scenario execution
· Develop adapters for commonly used and cutting edge test equipment, so that it can be controlled through an automation framework
- Simulation
· Create generic simulation frameworks that can be adapted to any kind of specific network infrastructures and protocols
· Integrate simulation frameworks with a computing grid to allow simulations to use variable amount of CPU power
