Protocol Conformance Test Principles And The Application

Practically, network protocols are serials of rules about computers communicating, which constitute the core of computer network. A couple of communication parties may exchange information effectively via identical network protocols. At present, the protocols are generally described by the natural language in RFC, resulting in different comprehension of different protocol developers. Thus protocol conformance test is an important step for the development of network devices.During the past years, Internet becomes more and more popular and is eventually applied in commercial use. Kinds of products and applications come forth correspondingly, which results in a huge and accelerating demand of IP addresses. Hence, IPv6 emerges that may inevitably replace IPv4 with the improvement of its protocol stack and the flourishing of related products. Moreover, it becomes an exigent problem to verify the conformance between the IPv6 protocols and its implementation, thus it has important significance to develop protocol conformance test execution system (CTES) for IPv6 protocol stack.In this research, the architecture of CTES has been proposed base on the theories and methods of conformance test. It is implemented on Linux platform and basic Ipv6 protocols are tested afterward. Furthermore, an Experiment System of Computer Network Protocol is designed and implemented which applies the principle of protocol conformance test. The detailed studies are listed as following:Firstly, propose CTES by analyzing the requirements and designing the architecture. The proposed CTES consists of three modules, including test agent, test executer and test interfaces, and the latter two ones make the key works of CTESSecondly, implement CTES with the proposed architecture. Two conformance test schemes (10 test cases) are executed for IPv6 and ICMPv6 on Linux operation system, by which many implementation errors have been found. The test results demonstrate effectiveness and practicality of the CTES.Finally, apply the principle of protocol conformance test. Based on the research of protocol conformance test, an experiment system of computer network protocol is implemented. According to the function interfaces and DLL provided by teachers, students can make up and implement protocols (such as HTTP, TCP, IP, RIP etc) to deepen the understanding of network principle . Then the server evaluates and judges their works automatically. The system not only relieves unnecessary workload of teachers, but also helps students understand the main concept and objection of network protocol design.