Protocol Analyzers

After JDSU acquiring Agilent testing unit solutions, the demand for engineers ready to provide telecom measuement equipment support, seems to have risen up in the air!

This post tries to provide insights in varied protocol analyzers' run time usage.

First what is a protocol analyzer?

It is a device analyzing granular details of  stream of  incoming high speed packets based on the programmed protocol. most commonly used protocol analyzers are ethereal, wireshark, RS-232 analyzers working on windows platform.

Figure below displays network packets captured on ethereal.

Ethereal is a freely available open source program that runs on almost any operating system.It is capable of dissecting 385 protocols including SMTP, ATM, IGRP, PPP, IPX, IP, UDP, TCP, MAC, Etherent. It also supports configurable filters that allow user to drill down on the particular data he is interested in. A snapshot of capturing options provided by ethereal can be seen below:

Wireshark is an enhanced version of ethereal; for details refer link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireshark