A case study in abstraction using E-LOTOS and the FireWire

Abstract

The proposed ISO standard Enhancements to LOTOS (E-LOTOS) is used to describe the leader election protocol of the IEEE 1394 serial multimedia bus (``FireWire''). The E-LOTOS language facilitates descriptions at several levels of abstraction, therefore a broad understanding of the protocol at an abstract level can be gained before adding more complexity and concrete detail. A secondary aim is to illustrate some of the novel features of E-LOTOS, particularly those for describing real time and parallelism. The speci®cation process is described in some detail, paying particular attention to the general applicability of E-LOTOS to protocol description. Veri®cation techniques and tools for E-LOTOS are considered, and comparisons are drawn between E-LOTOS and other similar formal methods. Ó

From LOTOS to LNT

“…This probably explains why E-LOTOS only had a marginal impact in practice. Very few case studies have been done using E-LOTOS; one can mention [96,99] (which compares LOTOS and E-LOTOS on a common example), [25], [21], and [92,93]. To our knowledge, E-LOTOS has never been implemented in software tools (except perhaps [25] or [75]) nor taught in university classes.…”

Four Formal Models of IEEE 1394 Link Layer

“…From a historical perspective, it is a striking success story where three doctoral students discovered in a few weeks an unexpected deadlock in an IEEE standard designed and scrutinized over ten years by one hundred experts. Also, numerous research papers have been devoted to another aspect of IEEE 1934, its leader election algorithm ("root contention protocol"), the verification of which involves parameters, probabilities, and real time [35,30,33,47,7,28,48,31,34,42,4,2,24,25,32,46,49,5].…”