Formal Verification of Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) Protocol using Cadence SMV

Routing protocols usually consist a huge state space (exponentially increase with the number of entities involved in the protocol) because of the concurrency and data-centric properties. The naïve approaches which directly use traditional verification techniques like explicit state exploration (e.g. Murphy [9]) or symbolic model checking (e.g. SMV [3]) often cannot make much progress due to the state explosion problem. Wireless routing protocol poses additional challenges, that is, the nature of the unstable environment requires wireless communication protocol to maintain extra information to keep a certain level of availability and fault tolerance. Also, the network topology changes require a more complex model. This makes the originally serious state explosion problem even worse. This paper studies a well-known routing protocol—AODV (ad-hoc on demand distance vector routing). We propose an approach to decompose the whole problem into relatively small problems and describe techniques to handle specific properties of communication protocols.