What is Protocol Testing?

Protocol testing is a non specific term utilized by organizations working in as a part of the communication industry for testing different protocols in domains of Switching, Wireless, VoIP, Routing, Switching, and so on.

Organizations like CISCO, JUNIPER, ALCATEL produce networking devices like switches/routers, modems, remote access points, and so on that utilization different protocols for communication, for instance, CISCO utilizes EIGRP, OSPF, and so on.

Protocol testing is only checking whether EIGRP (Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol) or OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) or whatever other protocol is working in according to particular standard.

Protocol Testing Process:-

•     For this testing, you require protocol simulator & analyzer
•     Protocol analyzer guarantees proper decoding alongside call and session analysis. While simulator simulates different elements of networking component
•     Normally this testing is done by DUT (gadget under test) to different devices such as switches and routers and configuring protocol in it
•     Thereafter verifying the packet structure of the packets dispatch by the devices
•     It checks versatility, performance, protocol algorithm etc. of the device by utilizing tools like lxNetworks, Scapy and Wireshark

Testing Types for Protocol Testing:-

Protocol testing involve testing of functionality, protocol stack, execution, interoperability etc. Amid protocol testing fundamentally three checks is finished.

•     Correctness: Did we got packet X when we required
•     Latency: How long does a packet take to travel the system
•     Bandwidth: what number packets we can send every second

Protocol testing can be isolated into two categories. Anxiety/Stress and Reliability Tests and Functional Tests. Stress and Reliability tests spread load testing, stress testing, performance testing, and etc. While functional testing incorporates negative testing, conformance testing, interoperability testing, and so forth.

•     Conformance Testing: The protocols apply on products are tried for adherence/follow such as IEEE, RFC etc.
•     Interoperability Testing: The interoperability for various merchants are tried/tested. This testing is done after conformance testing is done on the suitable platform
•     Network feature Testing: The components on networking products are tried for functionality with reference to the design report. For instance features can be port-security on a switch, ACL on a router etc.