In the short term, we can manually and semi-automatically check
protocols. In the long term, we will be able to generate
protocols from specifications in specialist languages.
We can <#829#> validate<#829#> a protocol -
check that protocol is free from syntactic errors, and is
simply self consistent.
We can <#830#> verify<#830#> protocol - can check that the protocol does actually
provide the required functionality.
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Free from deadlocks. States that it can't leave
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Free from livelocks. States that conspire to lockout others.
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Free from (useless) unreachable states.
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Free from busy idle behavior.
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May be able to analyze the performance of the protocol.
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Can study event scheduling within protocol.
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Can match event scheduling in network (other layers) to those in
the protocol.
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Can exploit genuine parallel nature of network components.