Parameterized Verification of Safety Properties in Ad Hoc Network Protocols

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in the parameterized verification of safety properties in ad hoc network protocols, focusing on the decidability and complexity of verifying network configurations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of the decidability and complexity boundaries for verifying safety properties in various network topologies.

Findings

Decidability varies with network topology assumptions.

Complexity boundaries depend on initial configuration parameters.

Certain topologies allow for decidable verification procedures.

Abstract

We summarize the main results proved in recent work on the parameterized verification of safety properties for ad hoc network protocols. We consider a model in which the communication topology of a network is represented as a graph. Nodes represent states of individual processes. Adjacent nodes represent single-hop neighbors. Processes are finite state automata that communicate via selective broadcast messages. Reception of a broadcast is restricted to single-hop neighbors. For this model we consider a decision problem that can be expressed as the verification of the existence of an initial topology in which the execution of the protocol can lead to a configuration with at least one node in a certain state. The decision problem is parametric both on the size and on the form of the communication topology of the initial configurations. We draw a complete picture of the decidability and complexity boundaries of this problem according to various assumptions on the possible topologies.