Testing Environment for Real-Time Communications Intensive Systems

In the engineering world, more and more accent is put on the real-time embedded applications. They are used almost everywhere, in domains as: automotive, robotics, health, avionics, spacecraft, industrial control, etc.. Often, on the proper functionality of real-time systems, depends the well functioning of a whole system and their mistakes might have fatal consequences. Often such real-time applications have additional requirements for a fast and reliable communication with the rest of the system they are part from. In order to prohibit misbehavior of such a critical application, proper tests should be developed and applied to it. Although real-time application development gained so much ground and a lot of tools and paradigms for real-time emerged, there are still little effort invested in the development of tools for software real-time testing. In this paper we propose a testing framework solution for real-time, based on a standardized testing language, that was used with success by now in many domains, as telecommunications, automotive, health, etc.. This language is named TTCN-3 - the acronym comes from Testing and Test Control Notation - and it was developed by European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the proposed test framework achieves both a time deterministic behavior and high performance at the communication points with the System Under Test(SUT).