Specifying Tests for Ad-hoc Mobile Systems

Mobile ad-hoc networks propose new challenges for software development and verification and validation (V&V) activities. Apart from the issues found in fixed distributed systems, fresh ones are presented in the new environment: high dynamicity or context awareness. New nodes are constantly joining and leaving, the application running on the host has to be aware of these changes. Nodes are moving out of each other’s communication range frequently, hence the failure of sending a message is not a rare event any more. The state of an application depends not only on the messages it receives from the others, it should also take into account its context, e.g., its current location coordinates supplied by a GPS unit or other information from the environment. Thus the testing methodology of these systems should take into account these specificities. The current modeling languages for specifying test cases have to be adapted to these requirements. This paper presents the typical problems of mobile systems through a case study. Section II presents the related work in modeling mobile systems, Section III describes the case study and the results of its analysis, while Section IV illustrates with examples why UML 2.0 Sequence Diagrams need extensions when used for specifying tests for mobile systems.