A survey of communication protocol testing

Abstract

Academic research has made significant advances in the generation of test sequences from formal specifications, and in the development of computer-aided test tools, with the aim of improving the effectiveness of protocol testing. However, this state-of-the-art research is not necessarily state-of-the-practice; these methods and tools are seldom used in the computer and communications industries. There is a big gap between testing practice and research results published in journals and reported at conference. To help the industrialization of academic techniques, empirical studies and a new orientation towards real issues need to be given higher priority by researchers, and real-life test coverage and field experience need to be more frequently reported [66]. This paper presents a literature survey of communication protocol testing. We have focused our survey on the following five areas: test sequence generation methods, test coverage, fault model and prediction, test tools, and experience reports.