Mutation Testing to Validate Networks Protocols

As networks continue to grow in complexity using wired and wireless technologies, efficient testing solutions should accommodate such changes and growth. Network simulators provide a network-independent environment to provide different types of network testing. This paper is motivated by the observation that, in many cases in the literature, the success of developed network protocols is very sensitive to the initial conditions and assumptions of the testing scenarios. Network services are deployed in complex environments; results of testing and simulation can vary from one environment to another and sometimes in the same environment at different times. Our goal is to propose mutation-based integration testing that can be deployed with network protocols and serve as Built-in Tests (BiT).This paper proposes an integrated mutation testing framework to achieve systematic test cases’ generation for different scenario types. Scenario description and variables’ setting should be consistent with the protocol specification and the simulation environment. We focused on creating test cases for critical scenarios rather than preliminary or simplified scenarios. This will help users to report confident simulation results and provide credible protocol analysis. The criticality is defined as a combination of network performance metrics and critical functions’ coverage. The proposed solution is experimentally proved to obtain accurate evaluation results with less testing effort by generating high-quality testing scenarios. Generated test scenarios will serve as BiTs for the network simulator. The quality of the test scenarios is evaluated from three perspectives: (i) code coverage, (ii) mutation score and (iii) testing effort. In this work, we implemented the testing framework in NS2, but it can be extended to any other simulation environment.