Packetizer

Test Tools, Protocol Analyzers, Call Monitors

In order to validate protocol implementations, various test tools are used today by the VoIP developers' community. As implementations mature, those tools are also used by service providers or technical marketing organizations during product interoperability testing or to verify protocol implementation compliance statements.

Protocol Capture Tools

A number of tools exist to perform real-time network packet capture. Some of the key features include real-time capture at wire speed, viewing and browsing the capture data in details, filtering of captured packets based on specific protocol or target network addresses, exporting of capture traces in various formats to be able to share the finding, printing capture in hex, text formats with frame number, etc.

Wireshark
Wireshark (formerly known as Ethereal) is a free network protocol analyzer for Unix and Windows. Wireshark is Open Source. It allows you to examine data from a live network or from a capture file on disk. You can interactively browse the capture data, viewing summary and detail information for each packet.

Support for numerous operating systems: WinNT, Win2000, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, etc.

Hints: make sure to disable Name Resolution when performing captures

Others

Network Associates' Sniffer™ products (since 1988), Acterna (WWG DominoNAS, Fireberd DNA), Spirent Communications (Netcom Systems), WildPackets' EtherPeek, NetXray™, snoop, Shomiti Surveyor, AIX's iptrace, Microsoft's Network Monitor, Novell's LANalyzer, RADCOM's WAN/LAN Analyzer, HP-UX nettl, etc.

H.323 Beacon

H.323 Beacon is a tool that can be used to measure, monitor and qualify the performance of an H.323 Videoconference session. It can help an end-user/network engineer/conference-operator, as a debugging tool by providing H.323-protocol specific evidence and other information necessary to troubleshoot H.323 application performance problems in the network and at the host (end-to-end). See the H.323 Beacon site for more details.

VoIP Call Monitoring, Analysis Tools, Simulation tools

Products in this category monitor VoIP calls in order to gather information related to quality of service (QoS) for the purposes of aiding engineers or service providers in product improvement and network planning.