Patent 8149730 was granted and assigned to Juniper Networks on April, 2012 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
In one embodiment, an apparatus includes a packet generation module that has a set of general purpose processing modules and is configured to define a test packet configured to emulate at least a portion of network traffic. The apparatus also includes a switch device configured to receive the test packet from the packet generation module. The switch device is configured to multi-cast the test packet via a set of ports of the switch device to a target entity based on a routing policy.