Store, Carry and Forward Testing Requirements
draft-ivancic-scf-testing-requirements-01

Abstract

This document provides guidelines and requirements for testing Store, Carry and Forward (SCF) systems and protocols.

The Testing Requirements document is one of three that fully describe the SCF system. The other two are the SCF Problem Statement and the SCF Requirements and Expectations document.

This initial document is currently just a skeletal outline, published so the other two SCF documents can reference it.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

This Internet-Draft will expire on June 21, 2014.

Copyright Notice

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Table of Contents

• 1. Terminology
• 2. Introduction
• 3. Test System
• 4. Test Requirements
• 5. Security Considerations
• 6. IANA Considerations
• 7. Acknowledgements
• 8. Informative References
• Authors' Addresses

1. Terminology

Detailed terminology is given in the SCF Requirements and Expectations document [I-D.ivancic-scf-requirements-expectations] and will not be repeated here.

2. Introduction

As background, the SCF Problem Statement and SCF Requirements and Expectations documents are suggested reading. The SCF Problem Statement describes the core SCF problem and gives an assessment of the ability to use existing technologies as solutions. In addition, it provides a number of SCF deployment scenarios.

In RFC760, one can find what has become know as Postel's Law or the Robustness Principle, "In general, an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior." This rule was originally targeting protocol implementation. A corresponding rule for testing may be, "If you claim the protocol can do it, you have to prove it - test it."

Conversely, being able to simply ping an end system does not indicate the network is fully functional. It just means that there is connectivity and the potential for the network to be fully functional.

The primary motivation for developing this document is to establish thorough, repeatable, tests that will fully exercise a SCF system. Past experience has shown that testing of SCF systems is too often inadequate. For example, tests have been performed on SCF systems in fully-connected, high-bandwidth networks where only forwarding would be exercised, or the traffic would be so minimal as to never tax the storage or queueing. Such tests are valid as a starting point, but insufficient to determine that a protocol or implementation will working properly in a reasonably-scaled deployment.

A secondary motivation is to improve implementations by providing a known test environment. Knowing some possible ways that the protocol and system will be evaluated may help establish how the code is developed, as well as identifying hooks for monitoring particular processes.

3. Test System

Figure 1 illustrates a generic testbed for testing may aspects of the SCF protocol. The systems consists of 12 SCF agents and 16 links. Any or all of the links may be disconnected at any given time. Even though the system is simple, some complexity is necessary because the system must accommodate testing of aggregation, deaggregation, and fragmentation with multiple container flows of various sizes and priorities.

  
 +------+                     +------+                      +------+
 |SCF-1 |                    /|SCF-5 |`.                  ./|SCF-10|
 +------+\                  / +------+  \              .-' /+------+
          \                /             `.  +------+.'   /
           `.            .'                `.|SCF-8 |`.  /
             \          /                  .'+------+\ `+.
 +------+     \+------+/      +------+  .-'           \/  `.+------+
 |SCF-2 |......|SCF-4 |.......|SCF-6 |::              |\    |SCF-11|
 +------+     /+------+\      +------+  \             / | .'+------+
             /          \                `.  +------+/ .+'
            /            \                 ::|SCF-9 |.'  \
          .'              `.              /  +------+`.   \
 +------+/                  \ +------+  .'             `-. \+------+
 |SCF-3 |                    \|SCF-7 |.'                  `.|SCF-12|
 +------+                     +------+                      +------+