Conformance Testing For Neighbor Discovery In IPv6

The Internet becomes more and more popular and is eventually opened for commercial use. Kinds of products and applications are introduced, which results in a huge and accelerating demand for IP addresses. IPv6 emerges as the times require. The reliability of a computer network relies heavily on the reliability of communication protocols. To ensure that implementations produced by different vendors have compatibility, protocol implementations must be tested for conformance to their specifications.The Neighbor Discovery for IPv6 is the basis of IPv6 protocols and is the cornerstone of the communication between the IPv6 nodes in Networks. It provides address resolution service, allows hosts to discover what neighboring routers are present and provides a mechanism for obtaining certain configuration information for them and defines Neighbor Unreachability Detection. Whether implementations of the Neighbor Discovery are conformance to the protocol will affect the communication quality of computer networks.This thesis first surveys the recent development in the state-of-the-art of conformance testing. Then the test generation methods in the area of communication are investigated and the merits and shortcomings of these methods are analyzed. By analyzing the Neighbor Discovery Protocol in detail, MSC model is made, test contents are determined and the suitable test generation method is proposed. Using the test suite produced by that method, the FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris and a commercial router were tested and found some faults in these implementations. The test generation method and the test suite are validated by the test practice too.