April 22, 2010 - Ixia today announced the results of a an LTE Evolved Packet Core (EPC) test performed with Alcatel-Lucent. The test broke the 100 Gbps barrier for mobile gateways, paving the way for terabit capacities in the EPC for upcoming LTE network deployments. A set of two Alcatel-Lucent 7750 Service Routers, deployed in the role of LTE/EPC Serving Gateway and Packet Data Network (PDN) gateway, were stressed using Ixia's IxLoad application and Acceleron load modules and successfully passed multimedia traffic over simultaneous 80 Gbps downstream and 20 Gbps upstream links.

Ixia IxLoad application and Acceleron load modules generated and tested a continuous flow of real-time traffic using more than 1.5 million active LTE connections (bearers) loaded at 65 Kbps each. This traffic, aggregated at more than 100 Gbps, was processed and passed across an Alcatel-Lucent EPC, which included two Alcatel-Lucent 7750 Service Routers. The scenario roughly equated to 1.5 million voice LTE channels or, inversely, more than 65,000 high-definition html-based H.264 video sessions running concurrently at aggregate speeds over 100 Gbps.

"These test results show that aggregate speeds over 100 Gbps are today's reality for the Alcatel-Lucent LTE Evolved Packet Core gateways -- speeds that are necessary to accommodate the exponential rise of traffic in the mobile broadband evolution," said Kevin Macaluso, Vice President and General Manager of the Service Router product group within Alcatel-Lucent. "Ixia had the hardware and software that could accommodate the scalability we needed to validate our product with real world application traffic."

IxLoad is a scalable solution for testing converged multiplay services and application delivery platforms. IxLoad emulates data, voice, and video subscribers and associated protocols for performance testing. Its unique and advanced subscriber modeling capabilities create realistic scenarios to validate subscriber quality of experience (QoE). Ixia's Acceleron family of load modules is the highest performing and most scalable application traffic generation solution available in the industry. It offers complete layer 2-7 packet generation, routing, and application testing functionality in a single XM load module.

According to the Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA), the number of mobile operators committed to deploying LTE advanced mobile broadband systems has more than doubled in the past year. With 64 operators working to implement LTE in 31 countries, GSA expects that up to 22 networks will be in commercial service by the end of 2010. The Economist recently predicted that mobile Internet users are expected to surpass fixed Internet users in 2011. If true, mobile data traffic in the coming years will reach volumes thousands of times higher than previously seen in wireless networks, imposing significant challenges on both the radio access network (RAN) and EPC in LTE mobile broadband rollouts.

"LTE is about massive increase of video and data traffic which demands massive throughput in the Evolved Packet Core," said Victor Alston, Senior Vice President, Product Development at Ixia. "This collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent sets a new benchmark for LTE data plane processing and showcases the best practices in LTE service quality validation."