On improving reachability analysis for verifying progress properties of networks of CFSMs

State explosion is well-known to be the principle limitation in protocol verification. In this paper, leaping reachability analysis (LRA) is advocated as an incremental improvement of a verification technique called simultaneous reachability analysis (SRA) to tackle state explosion. SRA is a relief strategy for the verification of progress properties of protocols modeled as networks of communicating finite state machines (CFSMs) without any topological or structural constraints. The improvement is a uniform and property-driven relief strategy which proves to be adequate for detecting all deadlocks, all non-executable transitions, all unspecified receptions and all buffer overflows in a protocol specified in the CFSM model. Experiments show that LRA can largely relieve the state explosion problem by reducing the amount of storage space and execution time required for verification.