A Combining Method for Wireless Protocol Conformance Testing: A Empirical Case

Ensuring the consistency of protocol implementation and protocol specification is the basic premise of wireless communication. With the application of wireless communication in more and more fields, the wireless communication environment becomes more and more complex, and the fault coverage of wireless protocol conformance testing is also facing more and more challenges. To solve this problem, this paper uses Finite State Machine (FSM) as a formal description tool for wireless protocols and presents a combining test method based on two test methods with complementary characteristics in the test technologies based on structural coverage and state identification. Then, the paper evaluates the effectiveness of the method based on 14 empirical cases. The experimental results show that the fault coverage of each empirical case can be effectively improved to 100% when the average test cost is only increased by 17.99%.

A Conformance Testing Methodology and System for Cognitive Radios

The fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks has started its operation in some countries and is aimed at meeting demands beyond the current system capabilities such as the huge amount of connected devices from IoT applications (e.g., smart cities), explosive growth of high-speed mobile data traffic (e.g., ultrahigh definition video streaming), and ultrareliable and low latency communication (e.g., autonomous vehicle). To attend to these needs, the electromagnetic spectrum must be made available, but the static spectrum allocation policy has caused a spectrum shortage and impaired the employment/expansion of the wireless systems. To overcome this issue, the dynamic spectrum access (DSA) has been promoted in 5G/6G networks, which is enabled by the cognitive radio (CR) technology. Although diverse mechanisms have been developed to tackle the challenges that emerge in different CR layers/functionalities, a standardized testing methodology and system for CR is still immature. Existing standards or methodologies and systems for CR only focus on the definition of network technologies (e.g., IEEE 802.22 and IEEE 802.11af), performance evaluation of CR algorithms/mechanisms, or definition of the device cognition level via performance results or psychometric approaches, not covering systems/methodologies to verify if the device meets the CR capabilities and regulatory policies, neglecting the conformance testing. In this respect, this paper proposes a flexible methodology and system for CR conformance testing under two perspectives, functionalities and limits. We instantiate it by using the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) software-defined radio platform and present a proof-of-concept with a conformance metric. The results show the feasibility of our proposal.