ETSI helping IoT testing with Test Description Language

Sophia Antipolis, 4 December 2018

The ETSI committee on Methods for Testing and Specifications (TC MTS) keep working on IoT testing with its working group TST.

The Testing (TST) working group develops studies, guidelines, test catalogues and test specifications for specific ICT technologies that are not already covered by other ETSI groups. Testing can include, but is not limited to, conformance, interoperability, security and performance testing.

The initial technical focus of the TST working group includes IoT network layer (communication protocols, node connectivity, edge computing etc.), IoT layer (data accumulation and aggregation) and application layer (interfaces, business processes etc.).

Following the advanced test methodology developed within MTS, it has been decided to apply the structured test objective specification, TDL-TO, ETSI ES 203 119-4, for the definition of test purposes.

Test projects currently cover MQTT, CoAP, LoRaWan and foundational security IoT-Profile of IEC 62443-4-2. The work of MTS-TST is correlated with active Open Source projects currently hosted by the Eclipse foundation. It includes Test purposes in TDL-TO but also TTCN-3 test code developments which are important for test campaign execution in the test labs. The ETSI group is in charge of test purposes developments and uses the resulting Test Purposes definitions for the ETSI technical specifications. This approach enables quick input from active developers and a fast implementation of the target test suites for industry. It also helps accelerate the development of ETSI specifications.

This activity supports the growing IoT sector. The industry is massively developing new products and services for the internet of things (IoT), industrial automation, new communications and software-based systems and many customers and authorities are uncertain about the quality of the offers. Security and interoperability are the main concerns, followed by connectivity, reliability, operability and performance. Current IoT related testing activities are very heterogeneous and include traditional conformance testing, interoperability testing, plugfests, hacking or crowd testing.

Today, several initiatives try to set-up quality labels or certification schemes for IoT solutions but without a systematic strategy of required quality assurance activities implied by currently used technologies. Therefore, it became necessary to have a common view on the scope of required tests for IoT quality assessment and certificates.