Formal verification on Distributed Spectrum Sensing Protocol

Wireless networks will provide much more convenience for mobile users via heterogeneous wireless architectures and dynamic spectrum access techniques. However, wireless networks also impose challenges on developers due to unknowing global electromagnetic environment information in each node, as well as diverse QoS requirements of various applications. Therefore, both correctness and reliability of communication protocol become extremely difficult. In years, model checking has been advertised as a way to ensure the correctness of complex protocols. In this paper, we present a formal approach of formalizing and verifying a distributed wireless communication protocol used for cooperative spectrum sensing. Lots of well-defined properties are then verified for the protocol model. By using the model checker SPIN, we have discovered some vulnerabilities in the protocol, which can make some nodes trapped into either false liveness or zombie status.