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A formal method to real-time protocol interoperability testing

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Abstract

Interoperability testing is an important technique to ensure the quality of implementations of network communication protocol. In the next generation Internet protocol, real-time applications should be supported effectively. However, time constraints were not considered in the related studies of protocol interoperability testing, so existing interoperability testing methods are difficult to be applied in real-time protocol interoperability testing. In this paper, a formal method to real-time protocol interoperability testing is proposed. Firstly, a formal model CMpTIOA (communicating multi-port timed input output automata) is defined to specify the system under test (SUT) in real-time protocol interoperability testing; based on this model, timed interoperability relation is then defined. In order to check this relation, a test generation method is presented to generate a parameterized test behavior tree from SUT model; a mechanism of executability pre-determination is also integrated in the test generation method to alleviate state space explosion problem to some extent. The proposed theory and method are then applied in interoperability testing of IPv6 neighbor discovery protocol to show the feasibility of this method.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Network Research Center, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    ZhiLiang Wang

  2. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Xia Yin & ChuanMing Jing

  3. Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNList), Beijing, 100084, China

    ZhiLiang Wang, Xia Yin & ChuanMing Jing

Authors
  1. ZhiLiang Wang
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  2. Xia Yin
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  3. ChuanMing Jing
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Correspondence to ZhiLiang Wang.

Additional information

Supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) (Grant No. 2003CB314801), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 60572082)

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Wang, Z., Yin, X. & Jing, C. A formal method to real-time protocol interoperability testing. Sci. China Ser. F-Inf. Sci. 51, 1723–1744 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-008-0153-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-008-0153-7

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