Specification and validation of communications in client/server models

Author

Lin, F. Joe

Author_Institution

Bellcore, Morristown, NJ, USA

fYear

1994

fDate

25-28 Oct 1994

Firstpage

108

Lastpage

116

Abstract

Errors such as deadlock and race conditions are very common yet extremely difficult to debug in the communications design of client/server models based on remote procedure calls and multi-threading. This paper presents an effective approach to detecting these errors. It shows how to apply the specification and validation techniques used in protocol engineering to discover those errors in the early stages of a client/server software development. The work is based on the protocol specification and validation tool PROMELA/SPIN. PROMELA is extended to a new language called PROMELA-C/S for additional expressive power of specifying client/server communications. A PROMELA-C/S translator is built to convert PROMELA-C/S to PROMELA for validation using SPIN. The paper also reports the results of some specification and validation trials using PROMELA-C/S, its translator, and SPIN

Keywords

client-server systems; fault diagnosis; hazards and race conditions; program debugging; program interpreters; protocols; queueing theory; remote procedure calls; software tools; specification languages; PROMELA-C/S language; PROMELA/SPIN; client/server models; client/server software development; communications design; communications error detection; deadlock; debugging; distributed systems; multi-threading; protocol engineering; protocol specification; protocol validation; race conditions; remote procedure calls; translator; Data structures; Debugging; Message passing; Power engineering and energy; Power system modeling; Process design; Programming; Protocols; System recovery; Yarn;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Network Protocols, 1994. Proceedings., 1994 International Conference on

Conference_Location

Boston, MA

Print_ISBN

0-8186-6685-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICNP.1994.344370

Filename

344370