How We Tested NEC's Unified Communications Platform

For this round of testing, the NEC Unified Communications platform was configured to provide a UC solution for a typical single office environment enterprise installation. Full redundancy for the principal servers, the SV7000 and the OW5000, was included and the deployment was equipped to support up to a maximum of 6,000 users with full voice messaging and unified communications capabilities.

By Robert Smithers and Martin Milner
Mon, February 09, 2009

Network World — For this round of testing, the NEC Unified Communications platform was configured to provide a UC solution for a typical single office environment enterprise installation. Full redundancy for the principal servers, the SV7000 and the OW5000, was included and the deployment was equipped to support up to a maximum of 6,000 users with full voice messaging and unified communications capabilities.

UC client endpoint compatibility between NEC's proprietary messaging system and IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft's Office Communicator was verified.

H.323 to SIP endpoint tests were conducted to verify that latency and voice quality were within acceptable limits for enterprise telephony. MOS 4.0 was set as our minimum, but the NEC phones performed better, achieving MOS scores of 4.4. For voice quality assessments we captured live traffic from the network and then performed post capture analysis with a ClearSight Analyzer, a distributed protocol and traffic analyzer from ClearSight Networks. Additionally, voice quality assessments for G.711 and G.729a codecs, used by the NEC hard phones, were both evaluated with Touchstone Technologies' WinEyeQ product and scored by a listening panel. The voice quality was described as "near high fidelity" by our testers.

SIP traffic load tests (which emulated endpoints) were conducted using the Empirix Hammer Transport and Touchstone's WinSIP. A very impressive 32,369 busy hour call attempts with 1,000 concurrent users was achieved in testing.

Also put to the test were the system's presence propagation abilities. To assess how long the system took to reflect a change in presence, we changed a test user's status from available to busy and timed how long the system took to reflect this.

A client scalability test using a scripted version of the real UC700 client (desktop client) showed generation of a credible 3,883 concurrent unified communications sessions. This test was designed to stress both call generation capabilities and presence propagation ability.

Security scans including open port scans, protocol interaction with mutated traffic, common vulnerability exploit tests, denial of service and SIP server torture tests were conducted using Miercom's testing suite combined with a Mu Dynamics Mu-4000 Security Analyzer. The vulnerability scans were run first to provide information that could be used in a subsequent compound or complex attack. SIP signaling analysis and verification of traffic encryption tests were again conducted using the ClearSight Analyzer.

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