State transition testing approach for ad hoc networks using ant colony optimization

Abstract

Nowadays, telecommunication software organizations are challenged to provide high-quality software to customers within their estimated time and budget in order to stay competitive within the market. Because quality is a defining aspect of the product, it is essential for a project manager to stay alert throughout the project lifecycle. Quality has a direct bearing on customer satisfaction, and if a company produces high-quality products, satisfied customers will rank it highly in customer satisfaction surveys. Additionally, dissatisfied customers are more vocal in their criticisms. Therefore, testing is an important step to produce more reliable systems. In this paper we address two important aspects of software testing for ad hoc network protocols. The first one is by integrating a high-level testing approach based on state transition on top of a network simulator in order to fill a perceived gap in existing network simulators. The second one is reducing testing effort by eliminating redundant test cases, in order to effectively improve the result accuracy of existing network simulators. In this paper, we implemented an automated state transition testing approach for wireless network routing protocols, using an improved Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. The expected result is to provide maximum coverage in terms of states and transitions.