A Framework for the Specification of Test Cases for Real Time Distributed Systems

The OSI conformance testing methodology and framework (CTMF) is a well established standard which defines and regulates the conformance testing procedure for protocol implementations. Conformance testing is meant to be functional black-box testing. Besides concepts and terminology, CTMF standardizes testing architectures and the <em>Tree and Tabular Combined Notation</em> (TTCN) as the test specification language. Since more and more distributed systems such as multimedia, safety-critical and real-time systems rely on the timely availability of information, testing of real-time requirements becomes a serious issue, too. Unfortunately, testing real-time and other non-functional requirements (performance and reliability) are outside the scope of CTMF. In this paper we present an extension of CTMF which allows to specify test cases for testing real-time requirements. The extension includes a generic testing architecture and a notation for test specification which is called real-time TTCN.