IPv6 Protocol Conformance Test System

With the development and application of IPv6, many IPv6 products come into China. Because different producers have different implementations on the same protocol, the protocol inconsistency problem is becoming serious. In order to assure the protocol implementation to be consistent to the standard and in turn to assure the interoperability between different IPv6 implementations, we developed an IPv6 protocol conformance test system. We define a formal specification language to formalize the IPv6 protocol conformance test suite. This paper gives out architecture of the test system, introduces formalization of the test suite, and presents the test process. The IPv6 conformance test system was used to test many different IPv6 implementations. Many inconsistency problems were found on them. Some advices were given to the producers to modify their implementations. Also a test case example for a Unix IPv6 ND protocol implementation is given and the test result is discussed.