Military Application Resilience
Emulating real-world network conditions to verify applications & systems
SNE Ignite
For O-RAN applications, this 100 GbE full line-rate network emulator with intrinsically low-latency (6.8 μs) is designed for high-precision applications such as 5G O-RAN O-DU to O-RU and O-DU to O-CU (fronthaul and midhaul) vendor interoperability testing, ensuring compliance to O-RAN WG4 and WG5 latency specifications and optimizing network ROI for operators.
SNE Ignite is also ideal for validating high-capacity datacenter interconnect designs. It’s not cost-effective to build the entire design only to discover unexpected behaviour after deployment. Designs need to be validated predeployment to ensure that they will operate reliably at the highest utilization levels under real-world network conditions, including congestion and interface failure. This type of characterization is ideally suited to SNE Ignite’s extensive impairment and maps capabilities to faithfully and repeatably produce defined network scenarios during the network vendor selection phase in the lab, or real world activity.
Features at-a-glance
- FPGA full line-rate throughput for all impairment and transparency features.
- Multi-port: Up to four pairs of full line-rate 100 GbE/25 GbE/10 GbE interfaces.
- Scalable – add interfaces as needed; flexible – any interface any slot.
- Market-leading in-line low intrinsic latency (6.8 μs).
- Sub 100 ns PDV and Jitter to maintain downstream device lock.
- Multi-user: Unlimited isolated users without impact to full line-rate performance.
- PTP (IEEE1588v2) Transparent Clock (TC), SyncE (ITU-T G.827x, G.781) passthrough.
- Nanosecond accuracy enables stringent, repeatable testing.
- SyncE and external clock inputs enable physical layer synchronization to a remote frequency reference.
Validate O-RAN interoperability
Using the SNE Ignite’s extensive packet and protocol impairments, the minimum and maximum latency performance to O-RAN’s T12_max/T34_max specifications can be validated in multi-vendor deployments. Multi-vendor O-RAN deployments eliminate vendor lock-in, but non O-RAN standards-compliant interoperation between components has a monetary cost to the operator because of the impact on network efficiency.
SNE Ignite is able to perform these O-RAN standards-driven validations with orchestrated impairments at the full line-rates of 100 GbE, 25 GbE or 10 GbE, along with transparent passing of PTP (IEEE1588v2) or SyncE (ITU-T G.8261, G.8262, G.8264 and G.781) signaling, essential for performing the tests.
PTP Transparent Clock (TC)
A network emulator with transparent clock functionality is essential for impairment testing in a time-synchronized environment. For PTP (RFC1588v2), this eliminates noise and ensures high priority S-plane traffic is not affected by large U-plane packets e.g. jumbo.
- Minimal Packet Delay Variation (PDV).
- Improves test repeatability.
- Maintains timing integrity upstream/downstream during impairment testing.
Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE) passthrough
Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE) passthrough ensures physical-layer frequency synchronization is preserved through the network emulator, enabling accurate and representative testing in time-sensitive networks.
- Enables precise validation of SyncE-dependent applications and network devices.
- Preserves physical clock continuity end-to-end.
Low intrinsic latency and minimal PDV
O-RAN fronthaul links (O-DU to O-RU) cannot be tested to O-RAN interoperability standards specifications unless the network emulator has an in-line latency of below 8 μs. SNE Ignite outperforms this with an intrinsic latency of just 6.8 μs, the first network emulator on the market with this level of performance.
SNE Ignite's user interface (UI) leverages the SNE's graphical map-based Web UI
- Drag and drop from the extensive list of impairments into your network “map” to create specific impairment scenarios to meet your testing needs.
- Take full control by linking together impairments in the order required and directly controlling the flow of packets around the simulated network.
SNE Ignite introduces precise, programmable network impairments into Ethernet traffic to emulate real-world conditions
Delay
Latency testing is critical for validating time-sensitive applications like 5G O-RAN fronthaul, where even microsecond-level delays can impact synchronization and throughput.
- Supports delay injection up to 3200 ms on 10 GbE and 320 ms on 100 GbE interfaces.
- Delay can be configured per flow using powerful filtering (e.g. MAC, VLAN, MPLS).
- Nanosecond-level accuracy ensures repeatable and deterministic testing.
Packet Loss
As few real-world networks are packet perfect, packet loss emulation is used to test application resilience and error recovery mechanisms under degraded network conditions.
- Supports both random and deterministic packet drops.
- Can be configured per flow using user defined filters.
- Used in SLA verification, RFC2544, Y.1564, and Y.1731 testing scenarios.
Jitter
Jitter simulates the variation in packet arrival times, which is especially disruptive in real time services such as voice, video, and synchronized radio units.
- Supports PDV injection with nanosecond granularity.
- Jitter profiles can be applied independently per flow.
- FPGA-based architecture ensures best-in-class intrinsic jitter (as low as 0.1 μs).
Packet re-ordering
Reordering simulates out-of-order delivery, which is critical for validating and characterizing packet reassembly behaviours.
- AI workloads.
- TCP reassembly stress testing.
- Load-balanced path emulation.
Errored packets
SNE Ignite supports frame-level error injection, enabling the simulation of bit-level corruption for OAM testing and protocol robustness validation.
- OAM testing.
- BER validation.
- Protocol resilience testing.
Duplication
Duplication emulates scenarios where packets are duplicated due to retransmissions or network loops.
- Application-layer deduplication testing.
- Network loop simulation.
- Resilience validation.
Applications
- O-RAN fronthaul (O-DU to O-RU) and midhaul (O-CU to O-DU).
- O-RAN 5G Mobile Edge Computing (MEC).
- 5G Core and backhaul.
- Datacenter interconnect/migration.
- Cloud migration planning.
- Telecom/Federal applications.
- Defense applications.
- Customer Proof of Concept (PoC).
- SLA verification.
- IPTV, video.
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