Wireless protocols design: challenges and opportunities

Modern wireless communication systems require the deployment of increasingly complex protocols that satisfy tight requirements at low implementation cost, especially in terms of size and power consumption. Most protocol design methodologies currently in use are inadequate, either because they do not rely upon formal techniques and therefore do not guarantee correctness, or because they do not provide sufficient support for performance analysis and design exploration and therefore often lead to sub-optimal implementations. Therefore, we use a refinement-based formal methodology that relies upon the orthogonalization of function and architecture design and emphasizes the use of formal models to ensure correctness and reduce design time. In this paper we present a case study, the Intercom, consisting of a network of mobile terminals supporting voice communication among end users. We use this case study to validate the methodology and identify directions of further research.