Abstract
Rether is a software-based real-time ethernet protocol developed at SUNY Stony Brook. The purpose of this protocol is to provide guaranteed bandwidth and deterministic, periodic network access to multimedia applications over commodity ethernet hardware. It has been implemented in the PreeBSD 2.1.0 operating system, and is now being used to support the Stony Brook Video Server (SBVS), a low-cost, ethernet LAN-based server providing real-time delivery of video to end-users from the server's disk subsystem.
Using local model checking, as provided by the Concurrency Factory specification and verification environment, we showed (for a particular network configuration) that Rether indeed makes good on its bandwidth guarantees to real-time nodes without exposing non-real-time nodes to the possibility of starvation. In the course of specifying and verifying Rether, we identified an alternative design of the protocol that warranted further study due to potential efficiency gains. Again using model checking, we showed that this alternative design also possesses the properties of interest.
Research supported in part by NSF grants CCR-9505562 and CCR-9705998, and AFOSR grants F49620-95-1-0508 and F49620-96-1-0087.
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Du, X., McDonnell, K.T., Nanos, E., Ramakrishna, Y.S., Smolka, S.A. (1997). Software design, specification, and verification: Lessons learned from the Rether case study. In: Johnson, M. (eds) Algebraic Methodology and Software Technology. AMAST 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1349. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0000471
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0000471
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