Verification of a leader election protocol: Formal methods applied to IEEE 1394

The IEEE 1394 high performance serial multimedia bus protocol allows several components to communicate with each other at high speed. In this paper we present a formal model and verification of a leader election algorithm that forms the core of the tree identify phase of the physical layer of the 1394 protocol. We describe the algorithm formally in the I/O automata model of Lynch and Tuttle, and verify that for an arbitrary tree topology exactly one leader is elected. A large part of our verification has been checked mechanically with PVS, a verification system for higher-order logic.