Formal modeling and verification of an enhanced variant of the IEEE 802.11 CSMA/CA protocol

In this paper, we present a formal method for modeling and checking an enhanced version of the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance protocol related to the IEEE 802.11 MAC layer, which has been proposed as the standard protocol for wireless local area networks. We deal mainly with the distributed coordination function (DCF) procedure of this protocol throughout a sequence of transformation steps. First, we use the unified modeling language state machines to thoroughly capture the behavior of wireless stations implementing a DCF, and then translate them into the input language of the UPPAAL model checking tool, which is a network of communicating timed automata. Finally, we proceed by checking of some of the safety and liveness properties, such as deadlock-freedom, using this tool.