Model-Checking Assisted Protocol Design for Ultra-reliable Low-Latency Wireless Networks

Abstract

Recently, the wireless networking community is getting more and more interested in novel protocol designs for safety-critical applications. These new applications come with unprecedented latency and reliability constraints which poses many open challenges. A particularly important one relates to the question how to develop such systems. Traditionally, development of wireless systems has mainly relied on simulations to identify viable architectures. However, in this case the drawbacks of simulations – in particular increasing run-times – rule out its application. Instead, in this paper we propose to use probabilistic model checking, a formal model-based verification technique, to evaluate different system variants during the design phase. Apart from allowing evaluations and therefore design iterations with much smaller periods, probabilistic model checking provides bounds on the reliability of the considered design choices. We demonstrate these salient features with respect to the novel EchoRing protocol, which is a token-based system designed for safety-critical industrial applications. Several mechanisms for dealing with a token loss are modeled and evaluated through probabilistic model checking, showing its potential as suitable evaluation tool for such novel wireless protocols. In particular, we show by probabilistic model checking that wireless token-passing systems can benefit tremendously from the considered fault-tolerant methods. The obtained performance guarantees for the different mechanisms even provide reasonable bounds for experimental results obtained from a real-world implementation.