Hi,
We are implementing a test setup to evaluate a network switch using two Mikrotik routers (CCR2004-16G-2S+). The test is conducted at a speed of 36 Mbps, with varying packet sizes: 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 1280, and 1518 bytes.
To validate whether this setup is viable for our implementation, we perform a baseline test by connecting ether1 on the first Mikrotik router directly to ether1 on the second Mikrotik router, ether2 (Mikrotik1) to ether2 (Mikrotik2), and so on, up to ether_n (Mikrotik1) to ether_n (Mikrotik2), without the tested switch (DUT) in between.
Example packet template:
name="m1.1" header-stack=mac,ip,udp interface=ether1 mac-dst=04:F4:1C:51:8A:4A/FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
assumed-mac-src=04:F4:1C:51:8A:26 assumed-mac-protocol=ip assumed-ip-dscp=0 assumed-ip-id=0
assumed-ip-frag-off=0 assumed-ip-ttl=64 ip-src=192.168.10.1 ip-dst=192.168.10.1 ip-gateway=192.168.10.2
assumed-ip-protocol=udp assumed-udp-src-port=100 assumed-udp-dst-port=200 assumed-udp-checksum=0
data=uninitialized data-byte=0 random-byte-offsets-and-masks="" random-ranges="" special-footer=yes
compute-checksum-from-offset=no-checksum
From our tests, we observed that running the traffic generator with a packet size of 64 bytes consistently results in packet drops. For other packet sizes, the results show both negative and positive packet loss values. While we understand this behavior and have implemented a solution to "balance" the lost packets, we are unable to address the issue with 64-byte frames.
Our questions are:
- Is there a limitation to the number of packets the traffic generator can handle? Our test criteria require zero packet loss.
- Is there a better way to set up the test to meet our requirements? One suggestion was to use a "burst mode" similar to that of iperf for the 64 byte frame.
- How accurate and reliable is the traffic generator in simulating network conditions and measuring packet loss (for all frame sizes above)? Could the observed packet drops be related to the configuration or operation of the traffic generator?
Any insights or help will be much appreciated.