How we did it

We tested performance of the Adtran NetVanta 4305 in seven different configurations: static routing, small- and large-table Routing Information Protocol routing, small- and medium-, and large-table Open Shortest Path First routing, and IPSec tunnel capacity.

In all routing tests, we used a pair of NetVanta 4305s connected back-to-back via up to 8 T-1 circuits. Adtran engineers configured the T-1 circuits to form a single logical circuit using multilink PPP (MLPPP).

We offered traffic to each of four 100Base-T Ethernet interfaces (two on each router) using a Spirent Communications SmartBits traffic generator/analyzer. We configured one IPv4 subnet on each Ethernet interface and offered traffic in a bidirectional, partially meshed pattern. This means traffic offered to Ethernet interfaces on one router was routed to both Ethernet interfaces on the other router, and vice versa.

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We tested performance of the Adtran NetVanta 4305 in seven different configurations: static routing, small- and large-table Routing Information Protocol routing, small- and medium-, and large-table Open Shortest Path First routing, and IPSec tunnel capacity.

In all routing tests, we used a pair of NetVanta 4305s connected back-to-back via up to 8 T-1 circuits. Adtran engineers configured the T-1 circuits to form a single logical circuit using multilink PPP (MLPPP).

We offered traffic to each of four 100Base-T Ethernet interfaces (two on each router) using a Spirent Communications SmartBits traffic generator/analyzer. We configured one IPv4 subnet on each Ethernet interface and offered traffic in a bidirectional, partially meshed pattern. This means traffic offered to Ethernet interfaces on one router was routed to both Ethernet interfaces on the other router, and vice versa.

In the static routing tests, we used the SmartFlow application for SmartBits to offer traffic between subnets. We measured throughput and latency for 64-, 256- and 1,518-byte Ethernet frames.

The MLPPP link between routers consisted of eight T-1 circuits in the static routing tests. In the dynamic routing tests, it consisted of only seven circuits because of a problem with the beta version of routing software on the NetVanta 4305s.

In the RIP tests, we used Spirent's TeraRouting Interactive to bring up RIPv2 routing sessions on each Ethernet interface. We advertised either 64 or 240 routes (for the small- and large-table cases, respectively) and verified that the NetVanta routers propagated all routing information. Then we offered traffic to all routes advertised. As in the static routing tests, we measured throughput and latency for 64-, 256- and 1,518-byte Ethernet frames.

In the OSPF tests, we configured the routers so that the T1 links were in OSPF Area 0, and the Ethernet interfaces of each router were in OSPF Area 1 and 2, respectively. We again used TeraRouting to form one OSPF adjacency with each Ethernet interface. We advertised either 64; 3,000; or 5,000 external (Type 5) link state advertisements and then offered traffic to all routes advertised. Here again, we measured throughput and latency for 64-, 256- and 1,518-byte Ethernet frames.

In the IPSec tunnel capacity tests, we used just one NetVanta 4305 router and configured the SmartBits and Spirent's TeraVPN 4.0 software to emulate multiple remote VPN gateways. We configured TeraVPN to use the most computationally intense authentication and encryption methods, secure hashing algorithm 1 (SHA-1) and 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256). However, we used pre-shared keying and not the more challenging XAUTH authentication method because of a problem with the test tool.

Adtran specified that the NetVanta 4305 would support up to 1,000 concurrent tunnels, which we attempted to verify by bringing up the tunnels and sending data over each.

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