One step forward

Abstract

Wireless self-organizing networks (WSONs) have attracted considerable attention from the network research community; however, the key for their success is the rigorous validation of the properties of the network protocols. Applications of risk or those demanding precision (like alert-based systems) require a rigorous and reliable validation of deployed network protocols. While the main goal is to ensure the reliability of the protocols, validation techniques also allow the establishment of their correctness regarding the related protocols' requirements. Nevertheless, even if different communities have carried out intensive research activities on the validation domain, WSONs still raise new issues for and challenging constraints to these communities. We thus, advocate the use of complementary techniques coming from different research communities to efficiently address the validation of WSON protocols. The goal of this tutorial is to present a comprehensive review of the literature on protocol engineering techniques and to discuss difficulties imposed by the characteristics of WSONs on the protocol engineering community. Following the formal and nonformal classification of techniques, we provide a discussion about components and similarities of existing protocol validation approaches. We also investigate how to take advantage of such similarities to obtain complementary techniques and outline new challenges.

Formal Specification and Validation of a Localized Algorithm for Segregation of Critical/Noncritical Nodes in MAHSNs

“…Most of the existing critical node detection schemes including [8, 9] lack rigorous validation and only use non-formal techniques (e.g., simulation) [23]. Simulation results are only effective for quantitative performance validation and do not guarantee correctness of the approach that is vital for safety-critical applications.…”

“…Nonformal techniques are unable to verify the correctness and detect design errors while modeling functional behaviors (e.g., interactions) of algorithms. Recently, some researchers have advocated the use of formal methods for algorithm validation in wireless networks [23, 27]. However, most schemes only use formal specification and did not use complementary verification and validation techniques.…”