An automatic protocol verification framework for the development of wireless sensor networks

In recent years, there are many active researches on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) as a way to collect diverse context information around the world. A lot of new WSN protocols have been proposed and implemented for the various application fields such as military, environmental, habitat monitoring, health, home and office, and other applications. When we compose a WSN protocol stack using several layers which have been designed and implemented individually, some uncertain protocol layer modules with malfunctions may cause the serious faults of their own or entire WSNs. Therefore, it is very important to verify functions and interoperability of each layer as well as to make well-defined protocol specifications. In this paper, we propose an automatic protocol verification framework for WSNs. The proposed framework consists of a test procedure description language written in XML and a test harness which executes test procedures. We have implemented the proposed framework and used it to verify some of our own WSN protocol layers. And our test framework has performed nicely. Therefore, we think that this framework would make it possible for WSN protocol developers to verify protocols easily.