Stress Testing

Network stress testing is usually testing the network device/element under heavy network load, rather than on what would be considered correct behavior under normal circumstances. In particular, the goals of such tests may be to ensure the software does not crash in conditions of insufficient computational resources (such as lack of memory or CPU utilization), unusually high number of requests, or denial of service attacks.

By simulating network impairments/concurrent requests it is possible to test applications under a variety of network conditions (the post how to emulate the network impairments http://testing-in-telecom.blogspot.com/p/netem.html).

The possible impairments that may be included in the stess testing:

• Reboot network device several times under heavy network load.
• Emulate incorrect/bad requests, frames towards the device under test
• Behavior under storm traffic (usually broadcast, multicast, small frames with highest speed)
• Live traffic from the network (the network devices should correctly handle the unknown frames, protocols from the network)
• Disconnect/connect the physical ports (Ethernet, TDM, management) under traffic