Automated Symbolic Timing Analysis for Distributed Systems

Abstract

A timing property of a distributed system is an assertion about the time intervals between events in executions of that system. There are three traditional approaches to determining timing properties of distributed systems: measurement, simulation, and analysis. Results from analysis can be symbolic and therefore much more general than results from measurement and simulation. For example, analysis can express the end-to-end delay of an atomic commitment protocol symbolically as a function of message delay and other system parameters. However, manual analysis of distributed algorithms is often tedious and error-prone. We have developed and implemented a state-exploration-based analysis that can automatically determine a large class of timing properties of distributed systems.