A Scalable and Efficient Client Emulation Method for IP Multicast Performance Evaluation

Tests intended for IP multicast based broadcasting services require a set of clients as receivers of the multicast traffic. Arranging these clients with PC terminals is not efficient for tests against high-end routers and switches of over thousands of interfaces. On the other hand, hardware testers are equipped with hundreds of dedicated test interfaces, however, preparing multiple sets of these hardware is expensive as these hardware are often high functional to use as multicast clients. This paper proposes a low cost method for efficiently emulating multiple multicast clients using an IEEE 802.1Q (tagged VLAN) enabled layer 2 switch and a PC terminal with a single Ethernet interface. We also describe its usage for evaluating layer 2 and 3 devices and its ability to monitor specific traffic destined for arbitrary clients.