Abstract
With the increasing adoption of Internet of Things technologies for controlling physical processes, their dependability becomes important. One of the fundamental functionalities on which such technologies rely for transferring information between devices is packet routing. However, while the performance of Internet of Things–oriented routing protocols has been widely studied experimentally, little work has been done on provable guarantees on their correctness in various scenarios. To stimulate this type of work, in this article, we give a tutorial on how such guarantees can be derived formally. Our focus is the dynamic behavior of distance-vector route maintenance in an evolving network. As a running example of a routing protocol, we employ routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks, and as the underlying formalism, a variant of linear temporal logic. By building a dedicated model of the protocol, we illustrate common problems, such as keeping complexity in control, modeling processing and communication, abstracting algorithms comprising the protocol, and dealing with open issues and external dependencies. Using the model to derive various safety and liveness guarantees for the protocol and conditions under which they hold, we demonstrate in turn a few proof techniques and the iterative nature of protocol verification, which facilitates obtaining results that are realistic and relevant in practice.
Highlights
The goal of routing is finding paths in a network along which data packets can be sent to enable communication between nodes that are not connected directly
Routing protocols are fundamental in the Internet and will likely remain important in the emerging Internet of Things (IoT),[1] which aims to make physical objects part of the global network
Testing alone may be insufficient to ensure that an implementation of a routing protocol is reliable, in particular, that it correctly handles network topology changes that are observable in practice
Summary
The goal of routing is finding paths in a network along which data packets can be sent to enable communication between nodes that are not connected directly. The tutorial is inspired by real-world problems that we have encountered when deploying RPL and is based on our previous work on those problems, involving mainly modeling and verification[6,7] and some empirical approaches.[8,9] Its goal as a whole is allowing the readers to apply a similar reasoning to produce complete proofs or counterexamples for their own hypotheses about the dynamic operation of distance-vector routing protocols, such as RPL, potentially in custom parameter configurations and deployment scenarios, to improve the dependability of those protocols and their implementations. We treat them together, thereby surveying related work from a perspective of the entire protocol development cycle
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