Construction of Network Protocols by Stepwise Refinement

We present a heuristic to derive specifications of distributed systems by stepwise refinement. The heuristic is based upon a conditional refinement relation between specifications. It is applied to construct four sliding window protocols that provide reliable data transfer over unreliable communication channels. The protocols use modulo-N sequence numbers. They are less restrictive and easier to implement than sliding window protocols previously studied in the protocol verification literature.

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