Testing mobile computing applications: toward a scenario language and tools

Advances in wireless networking have yielded the development of mobile computing applications. Their unique characteristics (dynamicity of the system structure, communication with unknown partners in local vicinity, context dependency) provide new challenges for verification. This paper elaborates on the testing technology. As a first step, a review of the state-of-the-art is performed together with a case study (a group membership protocol in mobile ad hoc settings), which allowed us to gain insights into testing problems. Work is then directed toward: (1) the definition of a scenario language with extensions to better account for mobile settings (spatial relationships, broadcast communication with neighbors), and (2) an automated support for the off-line analysis of execution traces to identify occurrences of described scenarios.

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