Network Testing: An Overview of Approaches

Today's networks are very large in size as well as complex by design. Validating today's networks against any problem is really cumbersome task with traditional approaches like ping, traceroute, tcpdump etc. Networks are generally susceptible to problems like loop, black-hole, drop, software bugs and physical failures. Protecting networks from these kind of problems using traditional approaches is complicated and time consuming which is not at all affordable in any enterprise scale networks. To avoid loss caused due to network problems, one should have tools which can validate network against above said problems in less time as soon as they are introduced in network. Researchers have developed many state of the art tools like HSA, ATPG, Veriow, Anteater, NetPlumber. These tools are capable of detecting forwarding state anomalies with minimum human intervention. Approaches used in above tools can be broadly classi?ed into two categories i. e. static validation and dynamic validation. Static validation is capable of detecting loop, drop and black-hole along with these, dynamic validation can detect problem caused due to software bug and physical failure. In this paper we will study general network problems, approaches to tackle them and some of their implementations in detail.