LANforge WiFire

LANforge WiFire - 802.11 a,b,g and n - wireless network traffic generator for testing, validation and audit

The LANforge WiFire appliance is an excellent choice for testing Access Points and other WiFi networks. The WiFire uses a modified Wireless driver for WiFi NICs based on the Atheros chipset. Depending on the appliance configuration, a single appliance can support from 32 Virtual Stations to 128 Virtual Stations. Each of the Virtual Stations has it's own IP address, IP port space, MAC address and routing table.

The Virtual Stations can be assigned to communicate to a particular Access Point, use a particular ESSID and Nickname, and have a WEP (64 or 128bit) or WPA key assigned. There is a single WiFi radio per WiFire appliance but multiple appliances can be clustered together for more realistic radio interference patterns and increased traffic generation capability. The radio can be configured in 802.11a, b, g or n mode. The radio's country code, channel, frequency, sensitivity, rate, RTS and Tx-Power can also be configured.

The Virtual Stations may be configured with all of the virtual interfaces on the same subnet, or different subnets, depending on the testing requirements. When used with something like VoIP, it allows all of the VoIP calls to use the standard IP ports (with one call per virtual interface).

LANforge WiFire Architecture

The Virtual Stations can be assigned to communicate to a particular Access Point, use a particular ESSID and Nickname, and have a WEP (64 or 128bit) or WPA key assigned. There is a single WiFi radio per WiFire appliance but multiple appliances can be clustered together for more realistic radio interference patterns and increased traffic generation capability. The radio can be configured in 802.11a, b,g or n mode. The radio's country code, channel, frequency, sensitivity, rate, RTS and Tx-Power can also be configured. The Virtual Stations may be configured with all of the virtual interfaces on the same subnet, or different subnets, depending on the testing requirements. When used with something like VoIP, it allows all of the VoIP calls to use the standard IP ports (with one call per virtual interface).

In the configuration above, the LANforge Fire Core can be one physical interface and act as the server. The LANforge FIRE Edge can be a sercond physical interface with multiple virtual interfaces configured on the WiFire appliance. Both interfaces can be on the same machine or multiple LANforge machines can be clusterd for increased traffic generation capacity or to resolve constraints imposed by the layout of the network.

LANforge WiFIRE Stateful Network Traffic Generator

LANforge WiFIRE 802.11a/b/g/n Traffic Generator

• Useful for testing Wireless Access Points and deployments.
• Can emulate up to 128 802.11a/b/g/n wireless client stations (Virtual STAs).
• Each Virtual STA can be associated with a particular Access Point (AP).
• Each Virtual STA has unique MAC address, IP address and routing table.
• 128bit WEP supported.
• Supports all LANforge FIRE traffic generation features, including HTTP, TCP, UDP, VOIP (SIP, RTP) and more.

 

 

LANforge Fire - Network Traffic and Voip Call Generator

Features and Transmit Characteristics	Description
Connection Types	Layer 2 and 3 - Raw Ethernet, TCP/IP and UDP/IP, IPv4 and IPv6 Layer 4 - FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, GOPHER, TELNET, PING, DNS,SNTP and NMAP VoIP - SIP, RTP and RTCP File Endpoints - NFS, iSCSI, or SMB (SAMBA) Multicast Streaming audio and video with flexible plugin architecture Wireless test appliance - Emulates up to 31 802.11a/b/g virtual stations
Transfer Rate	Fixed, Minimum and Maximum and transmit rates in bits per second. Random variation between the min and max creating a random stair-step pattern of data transmission over time.
Packet Size	Fixed, Minimum and Maximum and random in bytes.
Payload	The payload pattern for the data can be increasing, decreasing, zeros, ones, randomly generated and custom.
Port	Specify a particular port for IP traffic
ToS/QoS	For IP based protocols, you can specify the ToS (aka QoS) bits in the IP header.
TTL	This specifies the 'time-to-live' when configuring Multicast endpoints.
Checksum	Performs a 32-bit CRC calculation on the Payload.
VoIP	Specify SIP or H.323, CODEC, Ports, ToS, call setup, gateways, number of calls, ring time, Inter-Call gap and duration.
Virtual Interfaces	Emulates unique machines with one physical interface. Emulates Ethernet, IP, 802.1Q VLAN's and wireless virtual stations.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can LANforge WiFire be purchased as software?
No, special hardware and drivers are required, it is sold as an appliance.

What type of hardware and operating system does LANforge WiFire require?
LANforge Ice uses Industry standard PC hardware and can run on Windows and Linux.

How is LANforged Fire Licensed?
LANforge WiFire is licensed by ports of traffic generation and other features such as Virtual Interfaces, Armageddon and VoIP.

Does LANforge Fire support testing for TOS or QOS?
Yes.

Why might I want to deploy two appliances for use in testing Wireless devices?
Because the wireless domain is a single collision domain, no two radios can transmit at the same time on the same channel regardless of how many radios you have. They can *try*, but they will back-off and retransmit. The extra virtual wireless stations do help test higher-level layers, such as DHCP, access control, routing, ARP, firewalling and other protocols & algorithms that are often more difficult for APs than the actual wifi collision since the wifi collision logic is usually handled in the WIFI chip's hardware automatically.

Do you support Ipv4 and Ipv6?
Yes, Stateful TCP/Ipv4 (980 Mbps+ bi-directional with 64K byte writes (1500 byte MTU) on GigE), Stateful TCP/IPv6 (980 Mbps+ bi-directional with 64K byte writes (1500 byte MTU)on GigE), UDP/Ipv4 (990 Mbps+ bi-directional with 64K byte PDUs (1500 byte MTU) on GigE), UDP/IPv6 (990 Mbps+ bi-directional with 64K byte PDUs (1500 byte MTU) on GigE).