A Methodology for Passive Interoperability Testing: Application to SIP

The purpose of interoperability testing is to ensure that protocol implementations communicate correctly while providing the expected services. To perform interoperability testing, conventional approaches rely on the active testing method, which stimulates the network components and observing their reactions. However, the stimuli disturb inevitably their normal operation. On the contrary, passive testing is a technique based on only observing the external behavior of the network components. This paper proposes a formal approach for passive interoperability testing. Given the specifications of the network components and a test objective, a passive test scenario is derived by partially calculating their interaction. In addition, a trace analysis algorithm is proposed to verify the interoperability between the implementations. The proposed approach was successfully performed on a SIP protocol case study, where non-interoperability situation was detected. MOTS-CLÉS : test d’interopérabilité, test passif, modèle IOLTS, vérification de trace