Patent ID: 7184408

Claim:
A method for testing network communication equipment with a test packet generator, comprising: a) transmitting, from the test packet generator, a synchronization packet; b) generating a first data packet including a first header and a first payload; c) transmitting, from the test packet generator, the first data packet; d) providing a first inter-packet gap of a first length; e) generating a second data packet including a second header and a second payload; f) transmitting, from the test packet generator, the second data packet; g) providing a second inter-packet gap of a second length; h) repeating steps (b) through (g) at least once; wherein the first header is different from the second header; wherein the method further comprises counting a number of packets transmitted, receiving the packets, counting the received packets, and counting the received packets with errors; wherein the first and second inter-packet gaps comprise integer multiples of 8 bytes, the first header and second header are each 20 bytes longs, and the first and second headers contain different data, and wherein the size of the first packet is representative of a control packet on an Internet backbone, and the size of the second packet is representative of a data packet on the Internet backbone.