Formal Verification of 802.11 MAC Layer Handoff Process Using SPIN Model Checker

IEEE 802.11 based wireless local area network have been rapidly growth and deployment in the recent years. Critical to the 802.11 MAC operations, is the handoff process which occurs when a mobile node moves its association from one access point to another. In this paper, we firstly present the formal description of handoff process, based on finite state machine. And then, we extend the semantic of PROMELA, the accepted model of well-known model checker-SPIN, to make it applicable for the description of broadcast communication and timer characteristic in the handoff process. Finally, we carry out the formal verification for the linear temporal logic properties of handoff process using SPIN.