This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. On the Verification of a WiMax Design Using Symbolic Simulation

In top-down multi-level design methodologies, design descriptions at higher levels of abstraction are incrementally refined to the final realizations. Simulation based techniques have traditionally been used to verify that such model refinements do not change the design functionality. Unfortunately, with computer simulations it is not possible to completely check that a design transformation is cor-rect in a reasonable amount of time, as the number of test patterns required to do so increase expo-nentially with the number of system state variables. In this paper, we propose a methodology for the verification of conformance of models generated at higher levels of abstraction in the design process to the design specifications. We model the system behavior using sequence of recurrence equations. We then use symbolic simulation together with equivalence checking and property checking tech-niques for design verification. Using our proposed method, we have verified the equivalence of three WiMax system models at different levels of design abstraction, and the correctness of various sys-tem properties on those models. Our symbolic modeling and verification experiments show that the proposed verification methodology provides performance advantage over its numerical counterpart.