Reachability analysis of protocols with FIFO channels
Son T. Vuong, Donald D. Cowan · ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review · 1983
In a complete protocol design process, it is often important to validate the protocol for general correctness properties such as boundedness, deadlock absence, and well-formedness. However, for any general protocol modeled as a number of communicating finite state machines with unbounded FIFO channels, the above properties are known to be undecidable [Brand81a, Brand80a]. In this paper we demonstrate the decidability of those properties for a class of protocols, called well-ordered protocols. We introduce an algorithm for constructing a finite reachability tree for any given protocol with FIFO channels and show that by using this reachability tree, one can decide whether any given protocol is well-ordered, and if it is well-ordered whether it has an unbounded channel, a state deadlock, or an unspecified reception.