Generating of Conformance Testing Sequence for IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol

Since the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) put forward the next generation of Internet standards in 1998, IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) has gone through ten years of evolution and nowadays more and more IPv6 devices have been put into development and application. So how to improve the reliability and interoperation between different IPv6 implementations has become a key point. Conformance testing is an effective method to improve the reliability of IPv6 implementation and this paper will focus on the conformance testing of IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP).In this paper we first analyze the major function and principle of NDP and present the finite-state machine (FSM) model. Based on an existing improved algorithm for conformance testing we derive the abstract conformance testing sequence for NDP. We also also analyses the validity and reliability of this algorithm. The analysis results show that the length of the testing sequence obtained by using this algorithm is shorter than traditional U-method and the detection coverage for output error and tail state error is favourable.The abstract conformance testing sequence we derived in this paper can provide meaningful reference to Ipv6 protocal develpoers.