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Modelling and analysing the functional behaviour of TCP’s connection management procedures

  • Special Section CPN 04/05
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Abstract

The transmission control protocol (TCP) is the most widely used transport protocol in the Internet. It provides a reliable data transfer service to many applications. In this paper, Coloured Petri Nets are used to model TCP’s connection management procedures. The model is created to verify TCP’s functional correctness (e.g. the absence of deadlocks and livelocks). We discuss different modelling approaches to motivate the approach taken. The paper defines the termination property of TCP’s connection management procedures, including the notions of desired and acceptable terminal states. Finally, we analyse TCP’s connection management procedures operating over re-ordering non-lossy and lossy channels. This is done incrementally and considers 11 different configurations. The analysis provides some insights into TCP’s behaviour where in certain circumstances the protocol fails to establish or terminate successfully.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Systems Engineering Centre, School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes Campus, Mawson Lakes, SA, 5095, Australia

    Jonathan Billington

  2. 224, Leicester Street, Carlton, Victoria, 3053, Australia

    Bing Han

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  1. Jonathan Billington
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  2. Bing Han
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Correspondence to Jonathan Billington.

Additional information

The majority of this article was written while Dr. Han was at the University of South Australia.

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Billington, J., Han, B. Modelling and analysing the functional behaviour of TCP’s connection management procedures. Int J Softw Tools Technol Transfer 9, 269–304 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10009-007-0034-1

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