BNG Blaster

The open network tester for the IP networking community.

The BNG Blaster is an open-source network tester for access and routing protocols.

Originally developed as an access protocol tester, the BNG Blaster has undergone a significant evolution, transforming into a comprehensive network testing tool that now encompasses both access and routing functionalities. Its scope has expanded beyond the assessment of access protocols and now encompasses a broader spectrum, involving the evaluation of network functionalities at large. Contrary to its nomenclature, the BNG Blaster isn’t restricted only to BNG (Broadband Network Gateway) testing.

It simulates a massive number of PPPoE and IPoE (DHCP) subscribers, encompassing IPTV and L2TP (LNS). Additionally, it supports all common routing protocols such as IS-IS, OSPF, LDP and BGP. This allows for comprehensive testing of both BNG and non-BNG routers, enabling end-to-end evaluations.

The included traffic generator serves various functions. It can be used to verify forwarding, conduct QoS tests, and measure convergence times. With the capacity to handle millions of separate tracked flows, it allows for thorough verification of every forwarding state within a complete internet routing table. Furthermore, it enables the transmission of traffic to each specific QoS queue present in service edge routers with detailed per-flow statistics like receive rate, loss or latency.

The BNG Blaster is used by leading network operators like Deutsche Telekom AG with their famous Access 4.0 project, network hard- and software vendors like RtBrick and many more.

  • Emulate massive nodes and sessions with low CPU and memory footprint

  • Runs on every modern Linux, virtual machine and containers

  • All protocols implemented in user space and optimized for performance

  • Automation-friendly API

  • Optional DPDK support (experimental)

  • …

A short introduction from DENOG15 can be found on YouTube. There are even more videos and articles listed below.

BNG Blaster Interactive

The BNG Blaster has been completely built from scratch in C. This includes user-space implementations of the entire protocol stack. The core is based on a very simple event loop that serves timers and signals. The timers have been built using a lightweight constant time (O(1)) library. The timer library was built to start, restart and delete the protocol session FSM timers quickly and at scale.

BNG Blaster Architecture

This project will be actively maintained and further evolved by RtBrick. We are fully committed to building a project for the community and take issue and enhancement requests seriously. We are looking forward to any kind of contributions, new features, bug fixes, or tools. Even contributions to the documentation are more than welcome.

If you are interested in the BNG Blaster, or simply looking to find out more about it, we recommend going through the examples in the quick start guide.

Our mission is to build better networks with open test suites.

Contents

Contact

Articles

YouTube

Sources

License

BNG Blaster is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License, which means that you are free to get and use it for commercial and non-commercial purposes as long as you fulfill its conditions.

See the LICENSE file for more details.