Study of the characteristics of CT-Equivalence with proves

Abstract

“Semantic” equivalence between process specifications is essential for various phases of the development of computer/telecommunications protocols as well as other systems. This includes the verifications of the refined communicating entities and their underlying service provider against their service specifications. It includes also checking the equivalence of competing designs while developing the National or International Standards. Also, it is needed in transforming a specification given in the algebraic International Standardization Organization (ISO) Formal Description Technique (FDT) Lotos into an equivalent version given in the ISO FDT Estelle or the FDT SDL (Specification and Description Language) developed by the Telecommunications Standardization Section of the International Telecommunications Union (TSS/ITU). Nevertheless, often in conformance testing/certification testing of the final products this is needed to facilitate the derivation of testing sequences. In the literature, there are many notions for equivalence that aim at ratifying the problem of semantic equivalence. In this paper, we study the characteristics of Conformance Testing (CT) Equivalence. We prove that CT Equivalence ratifies significant problems with the other notions of “semantic equivalence” in the literature. We prove that CT Equivalence is a congruent equivalence and develop an application of it in verification.