Improvements on handling design errors in communication protocols.

With the rapid development of the Internet and distributed systems, communication protocols play a more and more important role. The correctness of the design of these communication protocols becomes crucial especially when critical applications are concerned. Common logical design errors in communication protocols include deadlock states, unspecified receptions, channel overflow, non-executable transitions, etc. Such design errors can be removed via protocol synthesis, or be detected through reachability analysis. The former may introduce more states and transitions than needed and the latter suffers from state space explosion problem. Here we present an improvement on existing technique to transform a protocol design into a deadlock-free one where the number of introduced new states and transitions can be considerably reduced. We also propose a sound reduction technique on a class of protocol designs to significantly reduce their sizes in order to perform reachability analysis.Dept. of Computer Science. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .D83. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1399. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxl017 A Blocking-based Approach to Protocol Validation

Reachability analysis is a commonly used approach to protocol validation, but it suffers from the well-known state explosion problem. In this paper, we present a new approach to reachability analysis called blocking-based simultaneous reachability analysis (or BSRA). A central notion in BSRA is that of a global blocking point. Instead of exploring every global state, BSRA only explores a set of global blocking points, which usually account for a small portion of the state space. We show how to use BSRA to detect several commonly found logical errors. Our experimental results demonstrate that BSRA can significantly reduce the number of states explored during protocol validation