Conformance testing: towards refining VHDL specifications

Unexpected failures of mission-critical communication systems used in the military necessitate the integration of conformance testing with the protocol design process. Such an integration will allow for the removal of costly mistakes from a specification at an early stage of the development process and will enhance the confidence in systems. This paper demonstrates how a close relationship between the protocol specification and conformance test sequence generation enables a more rigorously tested product. The study presented applies the algorithms developed earlier for the detection and removal of inconsistencies in VHDL specifications to the local proxy component of the adaptive computing architecture (ACA) specification. The ACA, a military-oriented network architecture prototype, is designed to manage the ever-changing defense network resources according to pre-defined network policies. Based on the results of the study, we recommend modifying the design to remove redundancies, uncover missing actions, and reorganize portions of the specification to improve its testability.