AN INTEGRATED ENVIRONMENT FOR DEVELOPING COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS

Due to technological advances and the international trends to open interoperable systems, development of communication protocols for computer networks and distributed systems is becoming increasingly complex and cost sensitive. Protocol engineers require an improved methodology, supported by powerful tools over the whole development process. In this paper, we introduce a development life-cycle based on formal methods. It is used to identify the different activities, from requirements definition to specification, implementation, and testing, together with the set of tools that apply to each phase. We then describe the architecture of an integrated tools environment for protocol engineering and report on a realization of the basic components.