Modeling and Testing of Network Protocols with Parallel State Machines

Xia YIN  Jiangyuan YAO  Zhiliang WANG  Xingang SHI  Jun BI  Jianping WU  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems   Vol.E98-D   No.12   pp.2091-2104
Publication Date: 2015/12/01
Publicized: 2015/09/15
Online ISSN: 1745-1361
DOI: 10.1587/transinf.2015PAP0013
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Networking)
Category: Network
Keyword: 
conformance testing,  model-based testing,  Parallel Parameterized Extended Finite State Machines,  Source Address Validation Improvements,  

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Summary: 
The researches on model-based testing mainly focus on the models with single component, such as FSM and EFSM. For the network protocols which have multiple components communicating with messages, CFSM is a widely accepted solution. But in some network protocols, parallel and data-shared components maybe exist in the same network entity. It is infeasible to precisely specify such protocol by existing models. In this paper we present a new model, Parallel Parameterized Extended Finite State Machine (PaP-EFSM). A protocol system can be modeled with a group of PaP-EFSMs. The PaP-EFSMs work in parallel and they can read external variables form each other. We present a 2-stage test generation approach for our new models. Firstly, we generate test sequences for internal variables of each machine. They may be non-executable due to external variables. Secondly, we process the external variables. We make the sequences for internal variables executable and generate more test sequences for external variables. For validation, we apply this method to the conformance testing of real-life protocols. The devices from different vendors are tested and implementation faults are exposed.