Towards interoperability test generation of time dependent protocols: a case study

Protocol interoperability testing is an important technique to ensure the quality of implementations of network communication protocols. In this paper, we present an efficient method to generate interoperability testing for time dependent protocols. We use the formal model, communicating TIOAs (timed input automata) (CTIOAs), to specify the system under test, in which time constraints are specified by linear expressions involving local clock values. In the method, firstly a global state reachability tree of CTIOAs should be generated, in which test sequences can be selected. Then we analyze the executability of the generated test sequences. By converting linear constraints of local clocks to a global clock, the problem reduces to a linear programming problem. We also select a set of appropriate initial clock values to make test sequences executable. An example of a neighbor discovery protocol is used to illustrate our method.