Case study on the use of SDL for Specifying an IETF micro mobility protocol

Recent protocols are become increasingly complex and lead added levels of complexity when used in combination. Globally this often results in ambiguous global specification and ultimately in ambiguous behavior. This paper, starting from a case study, presents a formal approach to validate protocols in a tight loop, leading to faster development cycles and higher quality standards. The formal specifications can be used as supplementary material to resolve behavior that is ambiguous from only reading the standards, often specified only in ASCII text. This formal specifications are further useful to validate the behavior of several protocols running together without the need for several independent implementations. The approach allows early validation using a large number of environmental triggers, including external unexpected behavior. Finally, useful guidelines are provided to allow easy development of such mobility environments by means of SDL tools.