When implementing any kind of communication protocol, one always dreams
of some existing test suite that one can simply run against the
implementation to check if it performs correct in at least those use
cases that matter to the given application.
Of course in the real world, there rarely are protocols where this is
true. If test specifications exist at all, they are often just very
abstract texts for human consumption that you as the reader should
implement yourself.
For some (by far not all) of the protocols found in cellular networks,
every so often I have seen some formal/abstract machine-parseable test
specifications. Sometimes it was TTCN-2, and sometimes TTCN-3.
If you haven't heard about TTCN-3, it is basically a way to create
functional tests in an abstract description (textual + graphical), and
then compile that into an actual executable tests suite that you can run
against the implementation under test.
However, when I last did some research into this several years ago, I
couldn't find any Free / Open Source tools to actually use those
formally specified test suites. This is not a big surprise, as even
much more fundamental tools for many telecom protocols are missing, such
as good/complete ASN.1 compilers, or even CSN.1 compilers.
To my big surprise I now discovered that Ericsson had released their
(formerly internal) shows
plenty of activity on an almost daily basis. Also, ;)
If you're curious about TTCN-3 and TITAN, Ericsson also have made
available a great (It's also the first time I've seen that
ETSI has a SVN server. Everyone else is using git these days, but yes,
revision control systems rather than periodic ZIP files is definitely a
big progress. They should do that for their reference codecs and ASN.1
files, too.
I'm not sure once I'll get around to it. Sadly, there is no TTCN-3 for
SCCP, SUA, M3UA or any SIGTRAN related stuff, otherwise I would want to
try it right away. But it definitely seems like a very interesting
technology (and tool).
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