Formal Methods for Communication Protocol Specification and Verification

Abstract

Increasingly numerous and complex communication protocols are being employed in distributed systems and computer networks of all types. This Note describes some of the more formal techniques that are being developed to facilitate design of correct protocols. Our major conclusion is that it is vital to specify the services provided by a protocol layer in addition to specifying the cooperating protocol entities which make up the layer. We develop service specifications of several representative protocols by using formal techniques from software engineering such as abstract machines and buffer histories. A survey of protocol verification methods and a bibliography indexed by key phrases are also provided.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Nov 01, 1979
Accession Number
ADA083263

Entities

People

  • Carl A. Sunshine

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Application Protocols
  • Communication Systems
  • Communications Protocols
  • Computer Communications
  • Computer Networks
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Science
  • Control Systems
  • Digital Communications
  • Formal Languages
  • Hypervelocity Flow
  • Language
  • Network Protocols
  • Network Science
  • Programming Languages
  • Software Development
  • Transport Protocols

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Business Analytics
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Computer Networking