Automatic Verification of the IEEE-1394 Root Contention Protocol with KRONOS and PRISM

We report on the automatic verification of timed probabilistic properties of the IEEE 1394 root contention protocol combining two existing tools: the real-time model-checker KRONOS and the probabilistic model-checker PRISM. The system is modelled as a probabilistic timed automaton. We first use KRONOS to perform a symbolic forward reachability analysis to generate the set of states that are reachable with non-zero probability from the initial state, and before the deadline expires. We then encode this information as a Markov decision process to be analyzed with PRISM. We apply this technique to compute the minimal probability of a leader being elected before a deadline, for different deadlines, and study the influence of using a biased coin on this minimal probability.