The Maxwell Network Emulator

See how your product behaves in poor network conditions—before disaster strikes.

High quality network emulators perform several diagnostic functions to test the stability of your network, whether you’re testing a new product, designing a network, getting ready to deploy a new distributed application, or qualifying new infrastructure equipment, it’s virtually impossible to anticipate everything that could happen to the data flowing through your network. Yet, it’s a known fact that corrupted packets can expose hidden vulnerabilities in your network devices. What’s worse, there are those who would unleash malicious network attacks designed to exploit these hidden vulnerabilities to uncover the prized data within.

That’s why we developed Maxwell, the Network Emulator. It enables you to modify, distort, and corrupt the flow of network traffic in a controlled manner so you can replicate real-world network conditions in your lab.

The Maxwell network emulation system also operates in real time and modifies packets while the protocol discussion continues. So, you can easily and thoroughly test the quality of service (QoS), resilience, and reliability of each network device.

Problem? What problem?

With the Maxwell network emulators you can perform numerous real world tests on your network. A lot can happen to a packet of information as it traverses intranets, extranets, wireless and satellite communications, and the global Internet. It can be lost, corrupted, duplicated, and delayed so badly that it arrives out of order. In addition, the packet can contain corrupted data. Once the quality of packet flow and content erodes, the way each device on a network responds can further complicate matters. Errors can cascade throughout the network until a failure occurs, then devices can crash, unexpectedly reboot, function unpredictably, and seriously compromise network security.

New, time-sensitive applications, such as video-on-demand, streaming media, and voice and video over IP also place higher QoS requirements on network devices. For instance, an interrupted file transfer is inconvenient. But even the slighted amount of jitter in a videoconference can be frustrating. And a dropped emergency call to a police or fire department can be life-threatening.

Create the network emulations you require to test network devices and applications with Maxwell.