Verifying Scenarios of Proximity-Based Federations among Smart Objects through Model Checking and Its Advantages

Abstract

This paper proposes a formal approach of verifying ubiquitous computing application scenarios. Ubiquitous computing application scenarios assume that there are a lot of devices and physical things with computation and communication capabilities, which are called smart objects, and these are interacted with each other. Each of these interactions among smart objects is called “federation”, and these federations form a ubiquitous computing application scenario. Previously, Yuzuru Tanaka proposed “a proximity-based federation model among smart objects”, which is intended for liberating ubiquitous computing from stereotyped application scenarios. However, there are still challenges to establish the verification method of this model. This paper proposes a verification method of this model through model checking. Model checking is one of the most popular formal verification approach and it is often used in various fields of industry. Model checking is conducted using a Kripke structure which is a formal state transition model. We introduce a context catalytic reaction network (CCRN) to handle this federation model as a formal state transition model. We also give an algorithm to transform a CCRN into a Kripke structure and we conduct a case study of ubiquitous computing scenario verification, using this algorithm and the model checking. Finally, we discuss the advantages of our formal approach by showing the difficulties of our target problem experimentally.