Progress on standardizing OSI conformance testing

Abstract International standards for Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) services and protocols are well advanced. Complementary standardization work has begun for testing conformance of products to OSI protocol standards. This is drawing on about 7 years R&D work on techniques and tools for testing protocol implementations. This paper presents the major aspects of the testing methodology and framework being standardized by ISO and CCITT. It relates some of the ideas to the work done in the R&D community and identifies the main topics on which further work is needed.