Ethernet has developed over the last decades and is today the dominant technology in data communication networks. Starting at 10Mbps, data rates has increased with the ever-growing demand for bandwidth.
For many years the NRZ modulation has been used for Ethernet signals sent over data lines. NRZ stands for “non-return to zero” – a modulation technique for serial communications that uses two voltage levels to represent logic 0 and logic 1.
NRZ is used in legacy Ethernet systems for speeds up to 100Gbps. However, speeds higher than 25Gbps are sent as a number of parallel signals each running either approx. 25Gbps or 10Gbps – the SerDes speed.
Other Ethernet standards have been developed that support higher rates than 100Gbps using another modulation technique (PAM4). However, there is still a vast number of NRZ-based Ethernet systems being deployed world-wide.
The Odin, Loki and Thor test modules in Xena’s Valkyrie platform support testing of NRZ-based Ethernet at data rates from 10Mbps to 100Gbps:
Xena’s Vulcan, Chimera and Vantage products also support testing of NRZ-based Ethernet.
Valkyrie is a stateless Ethernet traffic generation and analysis platform that supports all types of performance, QoS, conformance and functional testing at all speeds up to 800GE.
Vulcan generates stateful Ethernet traffic to analyze how devices such as firewalls, NICs, packet brokers, NAT routers, bandwidth shapers perform in a wide range of real-world scenarios.
Vantage is a stable and robust Ethernet production line solution with a very simple UI for testing switches, NICs, routers, GPON devices, cable modems, transceivers, cables and so on.
Chimera is a cost-effective solution for emulating different forms of impairment (e.g. latency and jitter, bandwidth control and shaping) between DUTs in the lab – at rates from 10GE to 100GE.
Xena has won multiple global awards for price/performance and technical innovation. Learn more.
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