| Abstract: | QoS monitoring is a kind of real-time systems which allows each level of the system to track the ongoing QoS levels achieved by the lower network layers. For these systems, real-time communication between corresponding transport protocol objects is essential for their correct behavior. When two or more entities are employed to perform a certain task as in the case of communication protocols, the capability to do so is called interoperability and considered as the essential aspect of correctness of communication systems. This paper describes a formal approach on modeling and interoperability test case generation of a real-time QoS monitoring protocol. For this, we specify the behavior of flow monitoring of transport layer QoS protocol, i.e., METS protocol, which is proposed to address QoS from an end-to-end's point of view, based on QoS architecture model which includes ATM network in lower layers. We use a real-time Input/Output Finite State Machine to model the behavior of real-time flow monitoring over time. From the modeled real-time I/OFSM, we generate interoperability test cases to check the correctness of METS protocol's flow monitoring behaviors for two end systems. A new approach to efficient interoperability testing is described and the method of interoperability test cases generation is shown with the example of METS protocol's flow monitoring. The current TTCN is not appropriate for testing real-time and multimedia systems. Because test events in TTCN are for message-based system and not for stream-based systems, the real-time in TTCN can only be approximated. This paper also proposes the notation of real-time Abstract Test Suite by means of real-time extension of TTCN. This approach gives the advantages that only a few syntactical changes are necessary, and TTCN and real-time TTCN are compatible. This formal approach on interoperability testing can be applied to the real-time protocols related to IMT-2000, B-ISDN and real-time systems. |
