A Weighted Random Walk Approach for Conformance Testing of a System Specified as Communicating Finite State Machines

초록

It is very important to test protocol implementations to verify conformance to their specifications (standards) in order to promote interoperability between them. This kind of testing is referred to as conformance testing. For that purpose, a kind of test scenario need prepared in advance and the involved work is called test generation. On the other hand, often a protocol can be specified succinctly and in an understandable way as a collection of communicating finite state machines. In this paper, we propose a test generation scheme called weighted random walk that can be applied to the test generation of communicating finite state machines. The proposed scheme is applied to an example protocol and some results of comparison with existing schemes such as pure random walk and guided random walk are presented. Our scheme is superior to the existing schemes in that it tends to test communicating finite state machines with fewer external test inputs. In illustrated example in the paper, our scheme shows about 48% improvement over the existing schemes in terms of the number of necessary external test inputs.