Testing methodology for an ad hoc routing protocol

• Authors: Stéphane Maag;Fatiha Zaidi
• Venue: Proceedings of the ACM international workshop on Performance monitoring, measurement, and evaluation of heterogeneous wireless and wired networks
• Year: 2006

Ad hoc protocols, Testing, Verification, Model checking, PLTL, SPIN, Simulations. In this paper, we define a model of an ad hoc routing protocol, i.e. the OLSR (Optimized Link-State Routing) protocol. This model handles novel constraints related to such networks and issues new challenges to treat these constraints. In the network community, the practice is based on simulation models that allow to perform performance measures but no formal methods are used. We propose to promote the use of formal description techniques such as the promela and SDL languages that are both well accepted in the community of communication protocols. Until now, few works exist that handle the formal description of ad hoc networks, this network has as a main feature the absence of infrastructure. So, conformance testing and verification need to be revisited in order to bridge the gap between these new protocols and formal methods. In order to test and verify such protocols we need first to dispose of a formal model of what we want to verify and test. This is what we propose herein