A Comprehensive Test Strategy for Network Protocols in Diverse Environment

In order to analyze important properties of network protocols, such as robustness and applicability, we may need exhaustive tests to observe effects of various factors under different settings. For recent protocols on dynamic, large-scale and environment-aware networks such as wireless sensor networks and mobile ad-hoc networks, we should consider many factors due to diversity of hardware profiles, upper/lower layer protocols and physical environments. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive test method to analyze the effect of (usually 10 or more) factors on such network systems. Our method takes a set of factors to be considered and their (representative) domain values as inputs, analyzes their effects on the systems, and determines dominant factors that have impact on the performance and their interactions. Instead of applying exhaustive tests that require all the combinations of domain values, we take a step-wise approach that examines step-by-step suspected sets of factors, which requires fewer combinations. We also justify this approach based on a reasonable fault model. The approach also contains an analytical method to identify the performance characteristics. Through realistic case studies, we show that we could find sets of dominant factors in wireless networks systematically.