Modeling and verifying strong cache consistency for mobile data access

Recent advances in wireless and mobile networks have led to the exponential growth of mobile applications. Unlike conventional computing, mobile computing has stringent constraints in network resources, such as bandwidth and connectivity. As such, data in mobile applications are often cached at clients to increase performance, data availability and reliability. Formal verification of cache coherence in data access is essential in ascertaining the validity of a cache coherence protocol. Although a number of studies have been made in this subject, few researchers focused on mobile data access. In this paper, we present an automatic approach towards formal validation of a cache validation protocol supporting mobile data access. This approach combines the flexibility of visual modeling techniques with the rigor of formal validation. As it is difficult to construct the formal model of protocol, we have developed a set of formalization and translation rules to automate the process of construction. The reliability of the protocol has been verified using model checking.