From Active to Passive——Progress in Testing Internet Routing Protocols

Routing protocols play an important role in the Internet and the test requirements are running up. To test routing protocols more efficiently, several enhancing techniques are applied in the protocol integrated test system described in this paper. The Implementation Under Test is modeled as a black box with windows. The test system is endowed with multiple channels and multiple ports to test distributed protocols. The test suite and other related aspects are also extended. Meanwhile, the passive testing is introduced to test, analyze and manage routing protocols in the production field, which is able to perform the conformance test, the interoperability test and the performance test. The state machine of peer sessions is tested with the state synchronization algorithm, and the routing information manipulation and other operations are checked and analyzed with the methods like the topology analysis and the internal process simulation. With both the active testing and the passive testing, the routing protocol test is going further and more thoroughly and helps a lot in the development of routers.