Mechanical Verification of the IEEE 1394a Root Contention Protocol using Uppaal2k

Abstract

This paper reports a mechanical verification of the IEEE 1394 root contention protocol. This is an industrial leader election protocol, in which timing parameters play an essential role. In this case study, we used the Uppaal2k tool and stepwise verification to investigate the timing constraints on the parameters which are necessary and sufficient for correct protocol operation. A manual verification of this protocol using I/O automata has been published in [19]. We improve the communication model from that paper and by analyzing large numbers of protocol instances with Uppaal, we derived the required timing constraints