Ahmed Helmy, Sandeep Gupta, Deborah Estrin, Alberto Cerpa, Yan Yu
The advent of multipoint (multicast-based) applications and the growth and complexity of the Internet has complicated network protocol design and evaluation. In this paper, we present a method for automatic synthesis of worst and best case scenarios for multipoint protocol performance evaluation. Our method uses a fault-oriented test generation (FOTG) algorithm for searching the protocol and system state space to synthesize these scenarios. The algorithm is based on a global finite state machine (FSM) model. We extend the algorithm with timing semantics to handle end-to-end delays and address performance criteria.We introduce the notion of a virtual LAN to represent delays of the underlying multicast distribution tree. As a case study, we use our method to evaluate variants of the timer suppression mechanism, used in various multipoint protocols, with respect to two performance criteria: overhead of response messages and response time. Simulation results for reliable multicast protocols show that our method provides a scalable way for synthesizing worst-case scenarios automatically. We expect our method to serve as a model for applying systematic scenario generation to other multipoint protocols.
Ahmed Helmy, Sandeep Gupta, Deborah Estrin, Alberto Cerpa, Yan Yu, "Systematic Performance Evaluation of Multipoint Protocols," Proceedings of the IFIP 20th Joint International Conference on Formal Description Techniques for Distributed Systems and Communication Protocols (FORTE 2000) and Protocol Specification, Testing and Verification (PSTV 2000), pp. 187--202, Kluwer Academic Publication, Pisa, Province of Pisa, Italy, October, 2000.
@Conference{Helmy00a,
author = "Ahmed Helmy and Sandeep Gupta and Deborah Estrin and
Alberto Cerpa and Yan Yu",
title = "Systematic Performance Evaluation of Multipoint
Protocols",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the IFIP 20th Joint International
Conference on Formal Description Techniques for
Distributed Systems and Communication Protocols (FORTE
2000) and Protocol Specification, Testing and
Verification (PSTV 2000)",
year = "2000",
pages = "187--202",
month = oct,
address = "Pisa, Province of Pisa, Italy",
publisher = "Kluwer Academic Publication",
URL = "http://www.andes.ucmerced.edu/papers/Helmy00a.pdf",
accept = "34",
cited = "8",
}