Simulation-based testing of communication protocols for dependable embedded systems

We present a novel approach to testing fault-tolerant and real-time protoco l implementations. CESIUM, our testing environment, executes the protocols in a centralized simulator of the distributed system. It simulates the occu rrence of inputs and the failure scenarios the protocols are designed to to lerate, while automatically verifying that the required safety and timeline ss properties hold at all times during test experiments. Within this framew ork, the human tester can define failure operations that simulate every fai lure class studied in the literature. We apply our approach to two fault-to lerant protocols typical in embedded systems. The results show that CESIUM can pinpoint implementation errors that would be very difficult to identify in a real system, and can also compute accurate performance predictions th at would be problematic to measure in the real embedded platform without ad hoc hardware instrumentation.