A multi-level approach has been proposed for generating test sequences for the control portion of communication protocols, given the specification. Test sequences generated using this approach have a high degree of fault coverage and the capability to recover from errors. The method does not assume the existence of an error-free reset input to move a protocol Finite State Machine (FSM) from any state to an initial state, unlike many other methods. The multi-level approach, thus, can be used to generate test sequences for real-world protocols. The methodology has been used to generate test sequences for a subset of the OSI Class 4 Transport Protocol and results are presented. © 1995.

Serugudi V. Raghavan

Computer aided software engineering

Computer system recovery

Fault tolerant computer systems

Finite automata

Input output programs

CONFORMANCE TESTING

NETWORK PROTOCOL OSI CLASS 4

Network protocols

IIT Madras is a public technical and research university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Founded in 1959, it is recognised as an Institute of National Importance.

IIT Madras has been ranked as the top engineering institute in India for four years in a row by the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the MHRD

It currently offers undergraduate, postgraduate and research degrees across 16 disciplines in Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Management. About 596 faculty belonging to science and engineering departments and centres of the Institute are engaged in teaching, research and industrial consultancy.

IIT Madras

Experience in test generation using multi-level approach

Computer Networks and ISDN Systems

Conformance testing of protocols is the process of checking whether an implementation under test conforms to the standards. In this paper we prove that the multilevel method (M method) [which splits the specification graph into a basic subgraph and one or more higher level subgraph(s)] is capable of diagnosing any number of faults in the higher level subgraph(s), if the basic subgraph is error-free. Heuristics for obtaining the basic subgraph and higher level subgraphs from the specification graph are also given. The advantage of the M method is that it has error recovery and, in addition, it does not assume the presence of reliable reset in the implementation under test. We additionally propose an incremental test sequence generation method, which produces a shorter test sequence and whose fault coverage is same as that of the M method. Finally, we compare the M method with other fault detection and fault diagnostic methods. © 1998 IEEE.

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

Scientific foundations to the multilevel method

Finite state machine based formal methods in protocol conformance testing: from theory to implementation

Journal	Computer Networks and ISDN Systems
ISSN	01697552
Open Access	No