Albedo xGenius - Configuring the Physical and MAC Layers

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Traffic Generation

• The test equipment is now ready to use some helper protocols to make the config-

uration process easier. Specifically, the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), con-

figures destination MAC address without user intervention. The Domain Name

Service (DNS) replaces the configuration of the destination IP addresses by the

much simpler domain name configuration.

• Ethernet frames carry IPv4 packets with an specific structure and content. It is

necessary to configure the IPv4 packet before it is prepared to generate IP data-

grams.

• Optionally IPv4 packets carry one or more MPLS labels. The transmission param-

eters of MPLS labels have to be configured when they are enabled.

4.2.1. Configuring the Physical and MAC Layers

Physical (layer 1) and MAC (layer 2) configuration is similar in IP Endpoint and Ethernet

Endpoint modes (See section 4.1.1, See section 4.1.2). The only difference is that

users now have at their disposal the ARP mechanism to configure the destination MAC

address automatically. ARP gets the destination MAC address from the network using

the destination IPv4 address by means a broadcast protocol.

To use ARP to set the destination MAC address without user intervention, you have to

configure the Destination MAC address from to ARP (See section 4.1.2). Once ARP

has been configured the test unit generates one or several broadcast ARP requests to

compute the destination MAC address. Generation of ARP control traffic is automatic

and it is not controlled with the run button like it happens with the test traffic.

DST

Prot

SRC

VIHL

Len

bytes

1234

Flg Offset

TTL Chk

PadOpt

ToS

IPv4 Datagram

DSCP

bits

DSCP: Differenciated Service CodePoints

CU: Currently Unused

DS Field

Figure 4.6: IPv4 datagram structure.

Data