Design And Implementation On Universal Conformance Test Execution System For IPv6 Protocols

Protocol conformance test is an important step for the network device development. It is necessary that IPv6 will replace IPv4. With the flourishing of IPv6 procotol stack and devices that support IPv6, it's a critical problem to verify the conformance of IPv6 protocols implementation and it's very important to develop protocol conformance test system (CTS) for IPv6 protocol stack. The CTS has been separated into two independent modules, the test suite module and the test execution system, in order to avoid that different test execution systems are necessary for differenet protocols in this thesis.After investigating the theories and methods for conformance test, a universal CTS software architecture has been proposed. Multi-layered test interfaces and a new Conformance Test Language (CTL) has also be designed and applied for this architecture. And finally two CTSs are implemented with the universal CTS software architecture on two different testing hardware platforms. The main achievements of this thesis are listed as following:1. Analyzing the requirements of universal CTS and proposing architecture for it. This architecture consists of test manager, test executer and test interfaces. The key works are test interfaces and script language design.2. Designing multi-layered test interfaces. Because the target protocols reside in different layers of the protocol stack the CTS requires multi-layered test interfaces. A mini-TCP/IPv6 stack is designed. It is compact and efficient and provides test interfaces for most of the protocols based on IPv6.3. A new test case description language CTL is designed and implemented. This CTL improves the previous TSS script language significantly. It is not only simple and efficient as TSS but also overcomes the weakness of TSS so that it has the ability to describe complex test procedures. The interpreter of CTL is implemented and it is protocol-independent.4. Implementing CTS with the architecture proposed, the test interfaces and the CTL designed. A singular structure CTS is implemented on InterWATCH test platform and a detached structure CTS is implemented on N2X test platform.