Concurrent Test Technology Research For Multi-Port Routers

The Next Generation Internet (NGI) has drawn tremendous effort worldwide, not only involving modification and implementation of the Internet protocol stacks over IPv6 but also involving techniques and tactics to migrate from existing IPv4-based Internet to IPv6-based NGI. Routers and Switches, as key devices in NGI, their testing techniques are playing more and more important roles not only in product development and evaluation, but also in network deployment and maintenance.With higher port-speed and larger port-numbers in modern routers and switches, testing of them is no longer a trivial matter and difficult to handle with the test methods & specification language defined in ISO/IEC JNT 1/SC21 9646. The most popular ISO test methods for relay systems, i.e. the Loop-back Test Method (LTM) and Transverse Test Method (TTM), originally were defined for conformance although they have been extended for other test purposes. For lack of adequate synchronization mechanisms in test methods and inconvenience in parallel test definition, LTM and TTM are not suitable for synchronized parallel testing, especially for performance testing.This thesis is dedicated to testing techniques for modern routers/switches with multiple high-speed ports, i.e. test methods, test definition languages and test systems. The main contribution of author's thesis is to provide a framework for modern router testing techniques typically represented by RDC-TTM (Router Distributed Concurrent Traverse Test Method), CMP-TDL (Concurrent Multi-Port Test Definition Language) and CMPTS (Concurrent Multi-Port Test System).The thesis is organized into 8 chapters.Chapter 1 is a background introduction to the dissertation.Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive study on existing testing techniques for routers, analyzes the requirements and challenges of modern router testing, and evaluates the inadequacy of current testing techniques. This chapter also provides a basis for the detailed discussions on modern router testing techniques.Chapters 3 and 4 present author's main contributions to router test method and parallel test definition language and detailed discussion and frameworks on RDC-TTM and CMP-TDL are provided.To meet the new requirements for synchronized parallel testing and existing test definition language TTCN3, an Extended TTCN3 (ETTCN3) is introduced in Chapter 5, with new features such as traffic generation and synchronous control. Chapter 6 presents a basic work of test suite planning and Chapter 7 is a description of the Concurrent Multi-Port Test System (CMPTS) under development at Sichuan Network Communication Technology Key Laboratory (SC-Netcom Lab). Finally, Chapter 8 gives a summary of this thesis with a forward view on future development and Appendix of the thesis lists the BNF description of CMP-TDL.