Challenge Overview
The Office of Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) at NASA Headquarters leads the Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) investigation with the goal of advancing the maturity and heritage (space flight use) of the DTN communication protocols.
Delay tolerant networks make use of store-and-forward techniques within the network in order to compensate for intermittent link connectivity. In the DTN the fundamental concept is an architecture based on Internet-independent middleware where protocols at all layers are used that best suit the operation within each environment, with a new overlay network protocol (bundle protocol) inserted between the applications and the locally optimized communications stacks.
We have an architecture and design for the ION-DTN changes that are needed to support LTP Authentication extension.
This competition will write a quality assurance plan and test scenarios to ensure that the requirements are met and the application works correctly.
Final Submission Guidelines
Requirements
The goal of this competition is to develop a quality assurance plan and test scenarios to ensure that the requirements are met and the application works correctly. You need to read the RFC 5326 and RFC 5327 (mostly this one) to identify your test cases.
Your tests must include the modules changed by the architecture specification. The plan and scenarios should test the application requirements for both positive and negative cases. A delay test for retransmission can be designed using ION utility called owltsim (packaged with ION source code).
Your tests should include, but not be limited to these:
- ionsec: test list, add, update and remove configuration
- outbound ltp: positive scenarios for transmitting LTP auth header, including header at FIRST segment only, ALL segments and at every N segments; multiple authentication headers; different cipher, etc.
- inbound ltp: positive scenarios for receiving LTP auth header, including header at FIRST segment only, ALL segments and at every N segments; multiple authentication headers; valid authentication and invalid authentication (different keys, different cipher), missing expected authenticated segments, etc.
- Delayed tests: delayed segments and lost segments using owltsim.
- Other tests not considered by the copilot: take a look at ION source distribution: each module has its test folder and there is a tests folder containing different scenarios, such as ltp-retransmission,
- Your tests should use available ION utilities such as bpsink and bpsource, but also new tools called ltpsend and ltprecv
- Your tests should also consider interoperability tests with another ION-DTN tool called Python LTP - http://sourceforge.net/p/ltpforccsds/code-0/ci/default/tree/
- Note: For 6 and 7 we will provide deployment guide as soon as a deployment assembly competition is finished
Submission deliverables
- A QA Plan written in a Microsoft Word compatible document.
- A Microsoft Excel compatible spreadsheet with the detailed Test Scenarios.
Documentation Provided
See download section at the right to download the following documents:
- A DTN overview tutorial
- The architecture specification
- ION-DTN deployment guide to VM
- ION-DTN and Python LTP deployment guide to VM (will be attached to forum later)
Technology Overview
- "LickLider Transmission Protocol" (LTP): RFC 5326
- "Licklider Transmission Protocol - Security Extensions": RFC 5327
- ION-DTN implementation: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ion-dtn/
- Python LTP - http://sourceforge.net/p/ltpforccsds/code-0/ci/default/tree/
- C
- Python
- Linux Ubuntu