Research on Stress Testing of OSPF Protocol Implementation

The stability and robustness of routing protocol implementations (RPI) in a router are becoming more and more important with the growth of Internet scale. A novel approach named stress testing is proposed to test the properties of RPI. Compared with some traditional test techniques, stress testing is remarkably necessary to inspect and analyze RPI. The test environment is proposed and the test process of OSPF RPI is illustrated by a stochastic Petri Net model with large-scale route simulation and OSPF protocol emulation. Based on this model, the integrated performance tester (IP-TEST) is designed and developed, with which we test a CISCO2600 router. With mathematical methods, we find that the computational complexity of OSPF implementation in this router is O((lnN) 4)to the number of its routing table entries. This experiment shows that this technique can inspect the stability, the computational complexity and the scalability of RPI. Furthermore, it can also be widely used with other routing protocols, such as RIP and BGP.