Design for testability of communication protocols that support coordination loss

In protocol conformance testing, there is an important class of errors, namely coordination loss that cannot be anticipated because some source of error is external to both the tester and the implementation under test (IUT). Furthermore, it is not possible to simulate their occurrence exhaustively in the test environment. Therefore they are very difficult to catch in the testing phase. In this paper we propose use self-stabilization as a design principle of Design for Testability (DFT) to overcome this testing problem. This will improve the reliability of protocol implementations derived from self-stabilizing protocol specifications. We present a novel algorithm and the corresponding design principles to design self-stabilizing protocols, and give an example of a self-stabilizing protocol. © 1999 IEEE

A superimposition algorithm for application-aware adaptation in mobile computing

In this paper we propose a superimposition algorithm than can be employed by a substrate to change its behavior according to current conditions or properties of the mobile environment. The algorithm has some interesting features such as it is completely distributed, works on-line, does not generate extra messages, and is based on unstable predicates. The algorithm proposed can be used by multiple local controllers that use information only from the subset of the participating mobile units. This is certainly an advantage over a centralized approach that is likely to be more expensive than distributed decisions since there are delays in the communication and the cost of sending extra messages. © 1999 IEEE