2021-11-08 –, Main Stage
BNG Blaster - https://github.com/rtbrick/bngblaster
When we started to build and test our BNG software for open hardware platforms, we got increasingly frustrated with the abilities and test methodology of commercial network testing software. Most solutions come with a dedicated hardware chassis or VMs with high CPU and memory requirements. Commercial network testing software is often limited by strict licensing. When performing regression testing overnight on cloud servers we have a peak license use of hundreds of instances, which we do not need most of the day. Our reliability testing crew complains often about slow reconfiguration from one test scenario to the next. Reprogramming the network tester often takes an order of minutes before the test suite can be run but we want to start/stop a test within an order of seconds.
Therefore we decided to build an open source network test software initially focused on BNG and IPTV testing but constantly enhanced and planned for more common network equipment test cases.
The BNG Blaster is completely built from scratch targeted for max scaling with a small resource footprint, simple to use and easy to integrate in our test automation infrastructure. It is able to simulate more than hundred thousand PPPoE and IPoE subscribers including IPTV, L2TPv2, QoS, forwarding verification and convergence testing capabilities.
- High Scaling: > 100K sessions
- Low CPU and Memory Footprint: < 100MB memory for 16K sessions
- Portable: runs on every modern linux, virtual machines and containers
- User Space: all protocols are implemented in user-space from scratch and optimized for high performance
- IPTV: IGMP version 1, 2 and 3 with automated channel zapping test
- QoS: define and analyze traffic streams
Automation: the BNG Blaster Controller provides an automation friendly REST API and robot keywords
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At RtBrick we already migrated all our testing to BNG Blaster which saved us more money on commercial network testers than spent on development for this software. We also received great feedback from GitHub users around the world using it. Therefore we will continue to sponsor this project with the target to form a large community of users and contributors.
Christian Giese is a software developer and field services engineer at RtBrick. Before he started his journey at RtBrick almost 3 years ago, he was working 7 years as a professional services consultant for access, core and automation at Juniper Networks, but his actual networking career started earlier in the BNG department of Deutsche Telekom AG formerly known as “Zentrum Technik Einführung”.
Over the last decade he was an inherent part supporting Deutsche Telekom AG to build their access and core network infrastructure.