Research On IPv6 Protocol Conformance Test And Implementation Of The Test System

The Internet Protocol (IP) has been the foundation of the Internet and virtually all multivendor private internetworks. This protocol is reaching the end of its useful life, and a new protocol, known as IPv6 (IP version 6), has been defined to ultimately replace IPv4. IPv6 includes functional and formatting enhancements over IPv4. With most of the technical details of these enhancements frozen, vendors have begun to move these capabilities into their products. However, due to human errors, a protocol implementation may not behave as specified. Thus, conformance testing is used to ensure the consistency between a protocol specification and its implementation.This dissertation first surveys the recent development in the state-of-the-art of IPv6 and protocol conformance testing. Then a test suite specification language (TSS) is designed specifically to describe the IPv6 test suite. Two new test methods called virtual test method and lower-layer congregation test method are proposed respectively. Based on the two test methods, the architecture of a system called V6PTS is designed and the system is implemented. With the IPv6 conformance testing system, 9 IPv6 test suites (including more than 200 test cases) are designed in TSS. The test suites can test the functions of 24 IPv6 RFC protocol standards, and were applied to testing four IPv6 protocol implementations on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and a router.The main creativities of this dissertation are explained as follows:1.A test suite specification language (TSS) is designed specifically to describe the IPv6 test suite.2.A new test method called virtual test method is proposed. Virtual test method makes use of the address field and other flag fields of a...