Abstract: Conformance and interoperability testing activities are crucial to the validation of real implementation. The challenges are nowadays well known and solutions for wired environments may be provided. Nevertheless, issues still remain for ad hoc routing protocols especially to check the reliability of Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. Most of the works related to the validation of such protocols are based on simulation and emulation analysis of simulated/emulated implementations without taking into account formal specifications. Indeed, inherent constraints from these networks raise new problems and research targets. Moreover, for many reasons, it has often been shown that the results obtained from simulator studies are far from the real case studies. In this talk, first I propose to establish a state of the art of that purpose and the existing solutions. Then I will focus on the testing issues related to conformance and interoperability of MANET routing protocols. Finally a nodes’ self similarity technique devoted to the protocol specification and the testing process is illustrated especially to optimize the testing coverage as well to deal with unexpected and unpredictable topologies, messages and verdicts. Interesting results are by the way provided and illustrated through experiments.


Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Dr Stephane Maag obtained his MSc in 1999 and his PhD degree in 2002 from the University of Evry. He is an Assistant Professor since 2002 at the INSTITUT TELECOM (Paris) and more precisely into the Software for Networks department and the VPS (Validation of Protocol and Services) research team. He is also involved as a researcher in the CNRS research group Samovar (UMR 5157) since 2003.
His current research activities are the testing of protocol and services from formal or semi-formal models in the MANET area. The application domains are especially the routing protocols (DSR, OLSR, etc.) testing phases, from the specification, the verification, validation and test sequences execution regarding the conformance and interoperability of the protocols.
Dr. Stephane Maag is involved in several projects such as the FP6/FP7 IST calls, Eureka projects (Σ!), ICT Asian projects and national ones. He also participates to the program committees of numerous national and international conferences. He published more than 30 papers in conference proceedings, books and journals. More details could be found on his webpage http://www-lor.int-evry.fr/~maag.