Products

Protocol testing tools

Computaris's protocol testing tools are based on the company's experience and expertise in the area of testing telecommunication applications in different stages of development and deployment. They are designed to be cost-effective, robust and convenient tools for telecoms software engineers at all stages of the development and deployment process.

Based around the open-source JMeter framework, the tools provide a flexible way to do feature, functional and performance testing of different applications from the telecommunication environment. The tools are designed to be horizontally scalable supporting massive throughputs on commodity hardware for load and stress testing, whilst of course the whole test session is controlled and results collated on a single console. For feature and functional testing, the tools are designed with maximum configurability in a graphical interface of protocols, sequences, messages, and data formats, to naturally support variations and vendor-specific extensions to the standard protocols.

The Diameter module is a versatile testing tool that gives the possibility to configure standard Diameter applications and their variants, to build specific message flows and validation conditions, and to specify timing and throughput parameters in the common graphical interface. The tool comes with predefined messages and AVPs, and in addition to this, the user can define the format of other messages and other AVPs permitting testing of any message format and any type of AVP, standard or vendor specific.

The CAP/IN module allows comprehensive testing of IN-based service control/charging interfaces, including CAMEL-standardised interfaces and, through configuration, and flavour of INAP-based service control. Roadmap development of the tool includes extension to cover the MAP standard, or potentially any SS7 Application Part (xAP).

In response to specific project requirements Computaris has also developed similar test tool modules for the IT protocols CORBA and SOAP which may be adapted to project requirements.

Diameter middleware

Protocol stack The Computaris Diameter-J protocol stack is a robust, efficient, flexible, 100% Java implementation of Diameter Base protocol RFC 3588 (Diameter base) and RFC 3539 (AAA transport profile). Design features include support for local validation of messages, pluggable encoding/decoding rules for opaque AVPs, active and passive flows (client/server), and JMX compliance. Connection peer state machine, decoding policies and even the threading model are designed as pluggable features to give maximum flexibility to the application designer.

Diameter Smart translation agent With the proliferation of implementations and vendor extensions, Diameter interworking is a live issue in many deployment projects. The smarter solution to diameter interworking is not necessarily to invest in interoperability tests or software adaptations but rather to get around it by using a proxy agent (Diameter Smart Agent) that is able to reconcile in real time different versions of Diameter, acting transparently for the peers involved in the message exchange.

Our focus is to reduce the integration time of various Diameter peers and allows to graphically creating transformation rules for Diameter messages; these rules are applied at runtime by our smart agent with minimal impact on the roundtrip time (translating a diameter message with 25 AVPs and 15 rules applied takes less than 5 ms). The graphical rules studio provided to model the transformation is designed to be used by a system analyst without technical knowledge of Diameter encoding and decoding rules.