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Formal Modeling of Communication Protocols by Graph Transformation

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FM 2006: Formal Methods (FM 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 4085))

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Abstract

Formal modeling is a crucial first step in the analysis of safety critical communication protocols such as IP Telephony. These protocols are notoriously resistant to formal modeling due to their sheer size and complexity. We propose using graph transformation, a straight forward, visual approach to do this. In experiments with Distributed Feature Composition (DFC) protocol and its implementation in BoxOs, we find that graph transformation offers several key advantages over naive methods in modeling the dynamic evolution of a reactive communication protocol. The generated model closely follows the way in which communication protocols are typically separated into three levels: the first describing local features or components, the second characterizing interactions among components, and the third showing the evolution of the component set. The graph transformation semantics described here follows this scheme, enabling a clean separation of concerns when describing a protocol. Using DFC semantics one can easily focus on individual telephones, features, and communication structures without reference to components not directly of interest. This separation is a key to being able to deal with even modestly sized communication protocols. Graph transformation is also a powerful formalism, allowing for very expressive and accurate modeling of the systems under study. Finally, the relative ease of using this semantics is demonstrated, and likely avenues for further use are outlined.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada

    Zarrin Langari & Richard Trefler

Authors
  1. Zarrin Langari
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  2. Richard Trefler
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Texas at Austin,  

    Jayadev Misra

  2. Institut für Informatik, Technische Universität, München,  

    Tobias Nipkow

  3. Department of Computing and Software, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, L8S 4K1, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

    Emil Sekerinski

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Langari, Z., Trefler, R. (2006). Formal Modeling of Communication Protocols by Graph Transformation. In: Misra, J., Nipkow, T., Sekerinski, E. (eds) FM 2006: Formal Methods. FM 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4085. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11813040_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11813040_24

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-37215-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-37216-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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