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Conclusions

CMC is successfully able to scale to systems as large and complex as the Linux TCP implementation. Also, CMC has found four bugs in the implementation.

As described in Section 7 and Table 4, CMC is successful in achieving a good coverage of the properties checked. We believe that the results reported in this paper can be improved by using a better reference model that checks for a wider range of properties. For instance, the current model does not check for congestion control properties (that the congestion window should reduce on a packet loss) and timer related properties (e.g. that a retransmission timer is appropriately scheduled for every transmitted packet).

To obviate the need for a separate hand-written reference model, we are currently exploring the possibility of simultaneously executing two different TCP implementations where one can check the behavior of the other. However, there are additional challenges in ignoring acceptable differences in the two implementations.



Madanlal Musuvathi 2004-03-03