A uniform approach to tackle state explosion in verifying progress properties for networks of CFSMs

State explosion is well-known to be the principle limitation in protocol verification. In this paper, we propose a verification technique called leaping reachability analysis (LRA) to tackle state explosion. We advocate LRA as a uniform and property-driven relief strategy for verifying general progress properties of protocols modeled as networks of communicating finite state machines (CFSMs). Unlike most existing relief strategies in the CFSM model, LRA does not confine any of the protocol attributes and still proves to be adequate for detecting all deadlocks, all nonexecutable transitions, all unspecified receptions and all buffer overflows in a protocol. We show by experiments that LRA can largely relieve the state explosion problem by reducing significantly the amount of storage space and execution time required for verification.