A Protocol Specification Language for Testing Implementations

Abstract

When developing a system that partakes in a communication protocol, testing whether the implementation conforms to the official specification of that protocol is difficult: the specification may be unclear or ambiguous and creating a simulator that automates tests is time-consuming.

The protocol specification language APSL is proposed, with which one can describe the types of messages used in a protocol, along with a model of the protocol’s state machine. It distinguishes itself from similar languages by allowing the generation of message parsers and serializers, and by providing an interaction model useful for conformance testing.

Additionally, an extensible framework is presented that can execute automatic conformance tests in order to determine whether an implemen- tation exhibits the behaviour expressed by an APSL specification.