INCREMENTAL PROTOCOL VERIFICATION METHOD

Protocol verification is an activity to assure the correctness of comm unication protocols. Global state reachability analysis is one of the most straightforward and easily automated protocol verification method s. This paper proposes an incremental protocol verification method for the Extended Communicating Finite State Machine (ECFSM) model. Increm ental protocol verification allows protocols to be modified at the run time of global state reachability analysis. Then, instead of re-explo ring the modified protocols from scratch, global state reachability an alysis is continued incrementally at the modification point. To enhanc e the efficiency, the proposed method incorporates the dead and live v ariables concept that is used in Chu and Liu's global state reduction technique (Chu and Liu, 1989). Using the proposed incremental protocol verification method, incremental protocol design environments are ach ievable for ECFSM-based Formal Description Techniques (FDTs), e.g. ISO 's Estelle. Our application of the proposed method to Estelle is also briefly introduced in this paper.