Formal modeling and analysis of the OGDC wireless sensor network algorithm in real-time maude

Abstract

This paper describes the application of Real-Time Maude to the formal specification, simulation, and further formal analysis of the sophisticated state-of-the-art OGDC wireless sensor network algorithm. Wireless sensor networks in general, and the OGDC algorithm in particular, pose many challenges to their formal specification and analysis, including novel communication forms, treatment of geographic areas, time-dependent and probabilistic features, and the need to analyze both correctness and performance. Real-Time Maude extends the rewriting logic tool Maude to support formal specification and analysis of object-based real-time systems. This paper explains how we formally specified OGDC in Real-Time Maude, how we could simulate our specification to perform all the analyses done by the algorithm developers using the network simulation tool ns-2, and how we could perform further formal analyses which are beyond the capabilities of simulation tools. A remarkable result is that our Real-Time Maude simulations seem to provide a much more accurate estimate of the performance of OGDC than the ns-2 simulations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a formal tool has been applied to an advanced wireless sensor network algorithm. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.