Design and Implementation of a Distributed Multi-Point Concurrent Test System

As the rapid expansion of Internet, IP routers are becoming more and more important and therefore must be exhaustively tested before being put into practice. However, the test methodology and test systems for IP routers hardly stay in touch with the state of the art. Based on the deficiency of existing stand-alone test systems for IP routers, the necessity of constructing distributed test systems is analyzed on several aspects and a new test system called distributed multi-point concurrent test system (DMC-TS) is introduced. DMC-TS is composed of one distributed test manager and several test agents. It has excellent scalability and extensibility and thus can simulate the real network circumstances for the routers under test. Key issues on the implementation of DMC-TS are discussed in detail, including the implementation of the distributed test manager and the test agents as well as the synchronization problem which is very common in distributed test environment. As a result, two types of synchronization problems are pointed out with corresponding solutions. On the basis of solving the issues stated above, the proposed system can be used to conduct conformance testing, performance testing and interoperability testing for IP routers. Some experiments are carried out to illustrate the feasibility and practicability of the proposed test system.