Research And Prototype Development Of Generic SUT Adapter Framework For Protocol Conformance Testing

Protocol conformance testing is not only the fundamental of protocol testing, but also the important activity of protocol engineering and protocol implementation. Nowadays, the rapid development of network protocol, especially the Internet of Things, has placed higher demands of conformance testing to support distributed testing. And the marketing demands also require the rapid development of related testing system. Most of testing systems use test adapters to communicate with system under test (SUT), which makes the functionality of test adapter is becoming the bottleneck of testing system.Current implementations of test adapter are mainly based on one specified protocol, and normally they are integrated with testing systems like TTCN-3. They are difficult to be extended, reused and communicate with multiple interfaces. Based on that, a generic adapter framework is needed to achieve our requirements.This paper proposes a generic SUT adapter’s framework and realizes a prototype system of generic adapter. The prototype is executed under two experiments of6LoWPAN conformance testing and CoAP conformance testing. Our work consists of following parts:1) Introduce the current studies of generic adapter, and propose the common requirements of a generic test adapter.2) Propose the generic adapter’s framework, including the overall architecture and module components. Propose the multiple-connection based communication management and plugin-based adapter management.3) Design and develop prototype system of generic adapter, including physical adapter, test system adapter and a new protocol.4) Develop3plugins for the prototype system:IEEE802.15.4Plugin、 Ethernet Plugin and UDP Plugin.5) Execute the prototype system in two conformance tests:6LoWPAN conformance testing to test a6LBR and CoAP conformance testing to test a CoAP Server.The research of generic adapter fills the blank of relevant field of conformance testing as current studies and applications of test adapters are still immature. The development of prototype system and the successful experiment prove the high practical application value in the market.