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What can we monitor over unreliable channels?

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Abstract

This article addresses the question of what properties can be monitored over an unreliable communication channel. We model unreliable communications as mutations to finite traces and define what it means for a property to be immune to such a mutation. We also introduce the idea of a trustworthy verdict, which is a verdict guaranteed to be correct in the presence of a trace mutation. We show that the trustworthiness of a verdict or immunity of a property for a single mutation is equivalent to the trustworthiness or immunity for any number of mutations. We classify trustworthy verdicts on \(\omega \)-regular properties by updating a recently proposed monitorability-focused refinement of the safety-liveness taxonomy. The article also includes a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm to test an \(\omega \)-regular property for immunity to a trace mutation. Our results show that many of the most common properties can be monitored over unreliable channels.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Rajeev Joshi for his early contributions to the work and the reviewers for their many helpful suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

    Sean Kauffman & Sebastian Fischmeister

  2. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA

    Klaus Havelund

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The research performed by the second author was carried out at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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Kauffman, S., Havelund, K. & Fischmeister, S. What can we monitor over unreliable channels?. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 23, 579–600 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-021-00625-z

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