From Active to Passive Progress in Testing Internet Routing Protocols
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 thoroughtly and helps a lot in the development of routers. This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant Nos.69682002 and 69725003. ZHAO Yixin was born in 1974. He obtained his B.S. degree from the Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University in 1998 and continued for his Ph.D. degree study till now. His speciality is computer network architecture. His current research focuses on the test of Internet routing protocols. WU Jianping received the B.S. degree in 1979 and the M.S. degree in 1982, both in computer science. In 1997, he received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Tsinghua University. Since 1993, he has been a professor of the Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University. Since 1993, he has been the (Crector of the Technical Board and director of the Network Center, China Education and Research Network (CERNET). Since 1997, he has been a member of the Administration Committee, China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). Since 1998, he has been a member of the Expert Committee, Computing (863–306), the National ‘863’ High-Tech Programme of China. From 1999 to 2001, he was a member of the Address Council of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). His research interests include high-speed computer network, Internet, protocol and network testing, formal methods. YIN Xia received the B.S. degree in 1995 and the M.S. degree in 1997, both in computer science. In 2000, she received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Tsinghua University, China. Now she is a lecturer of the Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University. Her research interests include formal methods, protocol and network testing, next-generation Internet.