Protocols are large and complex software systems. Complete conformance testing of an implementation against its standard may not be feasible in terms of the resources available. This paper discusses a new approach, the P-method, to the testing of meaningful subsets of communication protocols for an asynchronous model of communication. The approach is based on the probabilistic verification of protocols, which is carried out on the more probable part of the protocol first. The technique can be used for generating probabilistic test sequences for the conformance testing of communication protocols to standards. The proposed method yields meaningful protocol test sequences which test the most probable behaviors of a protocol when the testing of the complete protocol is not feasible. Probabilistic test sequences can be categorized into different classes. The higher the class a probabilistic test sequence is in, the larger the extent of the protocol it covers, and the better is the fault coverage. If the class of a test sequence is high enough, its fault coverage is comparable to the fault coverage of test sequences generated by other methods. Results from a study of the P-method, using alternating bit protocol (ABP) and a subset of NBS TP4 as examples, support the claims above. It can also be shown that if errors are introduced only to the more probable part of the protocol, the fault coverage of P-method is also comparable to other methods.>

Test sequences are used for the conformance testing of communication protocols to standards. This paper discusses a new approach to generating test sequences. The approach is based on probabilistic concepts about protocol state transitions and communication channels. The novel feature of the test sequences generated by this technique is that the most probable states of a protocol will be tested more promptly.