Abstract
Complete behavior of a communication protocol can be very large. It is worth investigating whether partial exploration of the behavior generates reasonable results. We present such a procedure which performs partial exploration using most-probable-first search. Some of the ideas used in this procedure are based on a convolutional decoding procedure due to Jelinek and a performance evaluation procedure due to Rudin. Multiple trees of protocol behavior are constructed. Some results on estimating the probability of encountering an unexplored state in a finite run of a protocol are also presented.
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Nicholas F. Maxemchuk received the B.S.E.E. degree from the City College of New York, NY, and the M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He is the Head of the Distributed Systems Research Department at AT & T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, and has been at AT & T Bell Laboratories since 1976. Prior to joining Bell Laboratories he was at the RCA David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, NJ for eight years. Dr. Maxemchuk has been on the adjunct faculties of Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. He has been an advisor to the United Nations on data networking and has been on networking panels for the US Air Force and DARPA. He has served as the Editor for Data Communications for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, and has been on the program committee for numerous conferences and workshops. He was awarded the RCA Laboratories Outstanding Achievement Award, the Bell Laboratories Distinguished Technical Staff Award, and the IEEE's 1985 and 1987 Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award.
Krishan Sabnani received a BSEE degree from Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India and a PhD degree from Columbia University, New York, NY. In 1981, he joined AT & T Bell Laboratories after graduating from Columbia University. He is currently working in the Distributed Systems Research Department of AT & T Bell Laboratories. His major area of interest is communication protocols. Dr. Sabnani was a co-chairman of the Eighth International Symposium on Protocol Specification, Testing, and Verification held in Atlantic City, NJ during June 1988. He is currently an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications and of the IEEE Transactions on Computers. He has served on the program committees of several conferences. He is also a guest editor of two special issues of the Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC) and the Computer Networks and ISDN Systems Journal, respectively.
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Maxemchuk, N.F., Sabnani, K. Probabilistic verification of communication protocols. Distrib Comput 3, 118–129 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01784022
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01784022