A Novel Approach on Centralizing Networked Applications

Software model checkers can directly be applied to single-process programs, which typically are multithreaded. However, multi-process applications cannot be model checked so easily. One approach is the manual merging of several processes into one, removing interprocess communication which is usually network-based. This process is very labor-intensive and a major obstacle towards model checking of client-server applications. Previous work has addressed the merging of multiple applications but mostly omitted network communication. Remote procedure calls were simply inlined, creating similar results for simple cases but also removing much of the inherent complexities involved. Our approach is a fully transparent replacement of network communication, resulting in a program that is much closer to the original. This makes our approach suitable for testing, debugging, and software model checking.