Design for testability of communication protocols that support coordination loss

In protocol conformance testing, there is an important class of errors, namely coordination loss that cannot be anticipated because some source of error is external to both the tester and the implementation under test, (IUT). Furthermore, it is not possible to simulate their occurrence exhaustively in the test environment. Therefore they are very difficult to catch in the testing phase. In this paper we propose use self-stabilization as a design principle of design for testability (DFT) to overcome this testing problem. This will improve the reliability of protocol implementations derived from self-stabilizing protocol specifications. We present a novel algorithm and the corresponding design principles to design self-stabilizing protocols, and give an example of a self-stabilizing protocol