Research On Test Control Data Planning And Specification For IPv6 Routers

Migration from IPv4 to IPv6-based NGI (Next Generation Internet) involves updating of existing network products, and testing of IPv6 products becomes an important task. As a result, relevant testing techniques have drawn considerable attention from academic and business communities, especially those of testing routers.The background of reseach and development work presented in this dissertation is the activities at SC-Netcom Lab concerning the concurrent multi-port testing for IPv6 routers and such activities aim at a distributed test environment for test centers. The test environment has two-level architecture: the Concurrent Multi-Prot Test Manager (CMPTM) at the top level, and the Two-Port Tester (TPT) at the bottom. The author's work presented in this dissertation chiefly involves the first phase research, i.e. the reseach and development with TPT, and an emphsis has been given to techniques of planning and specification of test control data for IPv6 routers.A test environment is composed of a test system and a test support tool set. The test system runs executable test control data, issues stimuli to the router under test, and observes its responses; while test support tools provide means for test specification in test specification languages and convert them into maching executable codes.Due to lack of systematic methodologies in test suite planning and standard test suites for IP routers in IETF, the author has dedicated her work to test suite planning and specification. This work is not only required by the development of CMPT test environment, but also meaningful for other people working in the same area.The author's contribution in this dissertation can be summarized as follows:1. Tentatively introduced a planning method for Generic Test Suites (GTS) and applied it to GTS planning for IPv6, ICMPv6, and RIPng summarized from experience with single-state and multiple-state protocols.2. Simplified the refinement process from GTS to test method relevantATS (Abstract Test Suite) by introduction of the ATIT (Abstract Test Information Table).3. Partially specified the ATS for IPv6, ICMPv6, and RIPng, and accomplished the ATS's syntactic and semantic verification with a TTCN-3 compiler developed by our lab and with the online TTCN-3 analyser of OpenTTCN.Planning and specification of test control data is a systematic and time-consuming work, and it involves understanding of relevant protocols. For the first-phase development work at SC-Netcom Lab has not yet been completed and therefore no operation environment for test suites specified by the author can be used in real testing. For the very reason, the author felt in debt to my collegues to leave some of the work uncompleted.