Generating minimal length test sequences for conformance testing of communication protocols

A new technique of generating a test sequence for conformance testing of communication protocols is presented. This approach shows that it is possible to generate optimal length test sequences which include multiple unique input output sequences that overlap under certain conditions. In the absence of these conditions, a heuristic technique is used to obtain sub-optimal solutions, which show significant improvement over optimal solutions without overlapping. A comparison is also made of the computational complexity of the author's algorithm with that of existing techniques. A brief discussion of bounds on test sequence length is presented and results are compared against these bounds.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>