scope:

The present document defines the "Continuous Signal support" package of TTCN-3. TTCN-3 can be used for the specification of all types of reactive system tests over a variety of communication ports. Typical areas of application are protocol testing (including mobile and Internet protocols), service testing (including supplementary services), module testing, testing of CORBA based platforms, APIs, etc. TTCN-3 is not restricted to conformance testing and can be used for many other kinds of testing including interoperability, robustness, regression, system and integration testing. The specification of test suites for physical layer protocols is outside the scope of the present document.

TTCN-3 packages are intended to define additional TTCN-3 concepts, which are not mandatory as concepts in the TTCN-3 core language, but which are optional as part of a package which is suited for dedicated applications and/or usages of TTCN-3.

This package defines concepts for testing systems using continuous signals as opposed to discrete messages and the characterization of the progression of such signals by use of streams. For both the production as well as the evaluation of continuous signals the concept of mode is introduced. Also, the signals can be processed as history-traces. Finally, basic mathematical functions that are useful for analyzing such traces are defined for TTCN-3. It is thus especially useful for testing systems which communicate with the physical world via sensors and actuators.

While the design of TTCN-3 package has taken into account the consistency of a combined usage of the core language with a number of packages, the concrete usages of and guidelines for this package in combination with other packages is outside the scope of the present document.