Exploring the effects of environmental conditions and design choices on IoT systems using formal methods

Abstract

Wireless communication protocols are often used in critical applications, e.g., urban water supply networks or healthcare monitoring within the Internet of Things. It is essential that control software and protocols for such systems are verified to be both robust and reliable. The effects on the hardware caused by environmental conditions and the choice of parameters used by the protocol are among the largest obstacles to robustness and reliability in wireless systems. In this paper we use formal verification to verify that a wireless sensor network synchronization and dissemination protocol is not adversely affected by these factors.