Passive performance testing of network protocols

Complementary to performance evaluation, performance testing of communicating protocols is a qualitative and quantitative test of a system, aiming at checking whether performance requirements of protocols have been satisfied under certain conditions. It raises an interesting issue of accurately formalizing specified performance requirements by taking consideration of data values of the protocol messages. In this paper, we present a novel logic-based testing approach to check protocol performance requirements through real execution traces and formally specified properties. In order to evaluate and assess our methodology, we develop a prototype and present experiments through a set of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) properties. Finally, a performance benchmark method is proposed and relevant verdicts and discussions are provided.