General Technique for Communications Protocol Validation

A technique for the validation of protocols in communications systems is described. It can be used for systems composed of processes that can be modeled as finite directed graphs. The validation exhaustively exercises the interaction domain of a system and identifies all occurrences of a number of well-defined error conditions. The method can detect when individual processes have no predefined response to incoming messages, as well as system deadlocks and potential loss of messages due to overflow conditions.