Case Study: Tsinghua University improves protocol testing education with Spirent TTworkbench

Using TTworkbench in Networking Courses forGraduate Students at Tsinghua University

Tsinghua University, a leading research institution in China, sought to provide its graduate students in a networking course with practical, hands-on experience in advanced protocol testing. The challenge was to find a professional-grade tool that could support the curriculum's focus on formal methods and TTCN-3, enabling students to move from theory to practical application for their course projects. They selected the TTworkbench test automation platform from vendor Spirent Communications to meet this need.

Spirent Communications provided an educational license for TTworkbench, which was deployed on a server for remote student access. Two student groups used the Spirent solution; one successfully completed a full model-based testing process for the FTP protocol, designing a model, generating TTCN-3 test cases, and executing them. This implementation gave students invaluable real-world testing experience and demonstrated a complete workflow. The positive outcome has led the university to plan future course projects with Spirent's tools to test emerging protocols like OpenFlow.

Tsinghua University

Zhiliang Wang

Associate Professor