Experiences in automating the testing of SS7 signalling transfer points

Signalling System 7 (SS7) is widely used for telephone signalling. Service providers need to frequently test their Signalling Transfer Points (STPs), which switch SS7 messages, for both protocol conformance and interoperability. This paper describes a system that automatically analyzes the data collected during STP tests. It consists of files that describe how the STPs are expected to behave during the test, and Perl code that translates this Expected Behavior into a program that can search the data collected during the test for the expected events, and report on whether the system passed the test. The system readily processed over 30,000 events for each test run, and identified abnormal behavior that could interfere with interoperability and protocol conformance.