State transition modeling and syntactic validation of a connection establishment protocol

Abstract

In this thesis, the state transition model of protocol and validation of its syntactic properties such as deadlock-freeness, well-formedness, and channel boundedness are discussed with the reachability analysis of the Petri-net. The tool for the automatic validation of any given two-process protocol model with non-FIFO channels and reception maskable states is also developed. By using this tool implemented in C language, the connection establishment protocol in Transmission Control Protocol(TCP) is validated. The result is that state deadlocks and channel overflows are not found but unspecified receptions which are recoverable semantically are found. Finally, the validation considering reception maskable states is shown to be more efficient than the validation not considering these states.