Testing (not only) telecom protocols

When implementing any kind of communication protocol, one always dreams of some existing test suite that one can simply run against the implementation to check if it performs correct in at least those use cases that matter to the given application.

Of course in the real world, there rarely are protocols where this is true. If test specifications exist at all, they are often just very abstract texts for human consumption that you as the reader should implement yourself.

For some (by far not all) of the protocols found in cellular networks, every so often I have seen some formal/abstract machine-parseable test specifications. Sometimes it was TTCN-2, and sometimes TTCN-3.

If you haven't heard about TTCN-3, it is basically a way to create functional tests in an abstract description (textual + graphical), and then compile that into an actual executable tests suite that you can run against the implementation under test.

However, when I last did some research into this several years ago, I couldn't find any Free / Open Source tools to actually use those formally specified test suites. This is not a big surprise, as even much more fundamental tools for many telecom protocols are missing, such as good/complete ASN.1 compilers, or even CSN.1 compilers.

To my big surprise I now discovered that Ericsson had released their (formerly internal) TITAN TTCN3 Toolset as Free / Open Source Software under EPL 1.0. The project is even part of the Eclipse Foundation. Now I'm certainly not a friend of Java or Eclipse by all means, but well, for running tests I'd certainly not complain.

The project also doesn't seem like it was a one-time code-drop but seems very active with many repositories on gitub. For example for the core module, titan.core shows plenty of activity on an almost daily basis. Also, binary releases for a variety of distributions are made available. They even have a video showing the installation ;)

If you're curious about TTCN-3 and TITAN, Ericsson also have made available a great 200+ pages slide set about TTCN-3 and TITAN.

I haven't yet had time to play with it, but it definitely is rather high on my TODO list to try.

ETSI provides a couple of test suites in TTCN-3 for protocols like DIAMETER, GTP2-C, DMR, IPv6, S1AP, LTE-NAS, 6LoWPAN, SIP, and others at http://forge.etsi.org/websvn/ (It's also the first time I've seen that ETSI has a SVN server. Everyone else is using git these days, but yes, revision control systems rather than periodic ZIP files is definitely a big progress. They should do that for their reference codecs and ASN.1 files, too.

I'm not sure once I'll get around to it. Sadly, there is no TTCN-3 for SCCP, SUA, M3UA or any SIGTRAN related stuff, otherwise I would want to try it right away. But it definitely seems like a very interesting technology (and tool).