A Survey of Protocol Verification Techniques

Verifying a communication protocol means ensuring that it is free of logical errors prior to implementing it. That is, the goal of verification is to guarantee that the protocol does exactly what the designer intended. Techniques for verifying protocols differ depending on the protocol modeling techniques used. All techniques begin by modeling the protocol as a collection of processes. Each process is specified as a finite state machine (FSM), as a program segment, or as a hybrid. It is the choice of a FSM or program segment approach that determines the verification techniques used.