Verification of a wireless ATM medium-access protocol

Abstract

We report on a model checking case study of an industrial medium access protocol for wireless ATM. Since the protocol is too large to be verified by any of the existing checkers as a whole, the verification exploits the layered and modular structure of the protocol's SDL specification and proceeds in a bottom-up, compositional way. The compositional arguments are used in combination with abstraction techniques to further reduce the state space of the system. The verification is primarily aimed at debugging the system. After correcting the specification step by step and validating various untimed and time-dependent properties, a model of the whole control component of the medium-access protocol is built and verified. The significance of the case study is in demonstrating that verification tools can handle complex properties of a model as large as shown.