Paradial Advanced Network Emulator - PANE©

Automated and efficient testing of IP-based audio and video communication solutions across different firewalls and NATs.

Key benefits

  • Validate a product’s operation when placed behind different firewall types.
  • Test different firewall types, or combinations of such, in order to validate client behavior
  • Test a product’s capabilities to adapt to sudden or unexpected network changes
  • Functional and (media) qualitytesting when subject to network issues, such as packet loss, delay, or reordering
  • Reproduce error scenarios in a controlled environment
  • Automate regression testing across all known relevant network topologies
Firewalls, NATs, web proxies and switches are known to pose serious challenges to anyone deploying VoIP, Unified Communication and videoconferencing solutions. Users expect services with high reliability, excellent quality of service (QoS) and security. Solutions that fail due to changing and unknown network topologies are at a clear disadvantage in the market place.

Understanding the impact of firewalls and NATs is the necessary first step when analyzing, planning and addressing network traversal challenges.

PANE has been developed to help organizations efficiently test and verify solutions in different network environments. Traffic between two communicating entities (client-server, server-server or client-client) can instantly be routed across different paths. A path in PANE contains a network device. Delay and other network artifacts, such as packet loss, reordering, and duplicates, are configurable per path. A multitude of paths can be configured in one PANE installation.

PANE consists of a set of predefined paths that emulates different NAT and firewall types, including symmetric, port restricted, and UDP-blocked. Other emulators can be configured. In addition, PANE paths can utilize network devices from different firewall and NAT vendors.

PANE’s clients can be any application running on any operating system connected to PANE through an IP network.

The figure below illustrates PANE’s architecture and how traffic is routed across different paths.