FOTG: fault-oriented stress testing of IP multicast

Network simulators provide a useful tool, for protocol evaluation. However, the results depend heavily on the simulated scenarios, especially for complex protocols such as multicast. There has been little work on scenario generation. In this work we present a fault-oriented test generation (FOTG) algorithm for automated stress testing of multicast protocols. FOTG processes an extended FSM model and uses a mix of forward and backward search techniques. Unlike traditional verification approaches, instead of starting from initial states, FOTG starts from a fault and uses cause-effect relations for automatic topology synthesis then uses backward implication to generate tests. Using FOTG we test various mechanisms commonly employed by multicast routing and validate our results through simulation.