Protocol conformance and performance testing are two branches of testing designed to determine compliance and performance of protocol implementations to their standard. Dr. CHE Xiaoping and Dr. MAAG Stephane from Laboratory UMR 5157 of French Center national de la recherché scientifique (CNRS) focus on converging these two kinds of testing in a same formal approach.
After several years of innovative research, they eventually created a formal approach to formally specify conformance and performance requirements. They successfully applied their approach on Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) and designed a distributed testing framework for XMPP services. Their work, entitled "Testing protocols in Internet of Things by a formal passive technique", is published in
SCIENCE CHINA
Information Sciences.2014, Vol 57(3).
Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) has gained more attention as a communication protocol in Internet of Things (IoT), which is a standardized protocol by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and well established in the Internet. XMPP is available for commonly used programming languages and device platforms. Several studies have investigated the potentialities of applying XMPP in IoT. With the tendency that XMPP is more and more widely used in many aspects of IoT, the problem of formally testing this protocol in a wireless environment is coming out in the wash.
Some works have tried to test the XMPP protocol under different conditions. However, they either simply evaluate the protocol performance or only test several conformance issues. It is worthwhile to note that conformance and performance testing are often associated within the protocol testing process.
This is testing information on global monitor: number of requests per second. Credit: Science China PressThey are mainly applied to validate or verify the scalability and reliability of the system. Many benefits can be brought to the testing process if both inherit from the same approach. Besides, very few works have tried to formalize the performance requirements which are mandatory for accurately testing the performance of protocols.
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