Scale testing using BBSim

Broadband Simulator (BBSim) is a control-plane only simulator that is used to test a SEBA POD at scale. On the one hand, unlike ponsim which emulates both the control and data plane, BBSim only does the former. On the other hand, BBsim can potentially simulate tens of OLTs and thousands of ONUs, making it an ideal tool for control plane scale testing. One additional benefit of BBSim is that it uses the OpenOLT adaptor in VOLTHA, unlike ponsim which uses its own specialized adaptor.

You can run BBSim on top of any SEBA installation, physical or virtual (SiaB). For instructions on how to install it you can refer to the bbsim helm reference.

System configurations that affects BBSim

The most important detail that determines how BBSim will behave is the L2-DHCP-relay configuration of the SEBA installation.

There are two options:

  • sending DHCP packets out of the AGG switch's uplink port
  • sending DHCP packets out of the OLT's NNI port

DHCP Packets through the aggregation switch

This is the way a physical POD is set up to work. If you decide to follow this route no changes are required in the configuration but you'll need to make sure your DHCP server is configured to assign IP Addresses to subscriber requesting them with S-Tag set as 999 and C-Tag starting from 900 for the first subscriber and increasing by one for each subscriber.

DHCP Packets back to the OLT

If you don't have a DHCP server configured accordingly you can use the DHCP server that runs inside BBSim itself. To do that you need to send the DHCP Packets back to the OLT.

To do that you can use this TOSCA recipe: https://github.com/opencord/helm-charts/blob/master/examples/bbsim-dhcp.yaml