Formal verification of a Cooperative Automatic Repeat reQuest MAC protocol

Cooperative communications, in which a relay node assists the source node to deliver its packets to the destination node thus adding diversity, is gaining more attention within the research community. The initial studies on the physical layer have shown significant gains from cooperative diversity in terms of reliability, coverage range and energy efficiency. A Cooperative Automatic Repeat reQuest MAC protocol, (C-ARQ), has been proposed to utilize cooperative diversity from the MAC layer. In this paper, we inspect this novel C-ARQ protocol to check its integrity and validity using formal methods. The protocol logic is modeled in SDL and implemented in PROMELA. The functionality of the C-ARQ protocol is confirmed through simulations and verified using the SPIN tool.