Investigation Of OSI Protocols For Distributed Interactive Simulation: Final Report, A Transition Plan

Report assesses the impact of using Open System Interconnection (OSI) protocols in the distributed interactive simulation (DIS) environment

Tailored Protocol Development Using ESTEREL

The rapid evolution of networking and the multiplication of new applications re-emphasizes the importance of the efficient communication supports. Implementations must be able to take maximal advantage of the details of application-specific semantics and of specific networking environments. In other words, the application needs to have more control over data transmission. Such control can be obtained by tailoring the communication facilities (or protocols) to the application characteritics, and by integrating the communication control to the application. Because such a task is too complex to be realized manually, we propose to automate the protocol development process using a formal approach. This report presents our approach to the automated design and implementation of application- specific communication protocols based on information provided by the application. Starting from the formal description of an application, our approach is based on a tool called "Protocol Compiler" that will automatically produce the implementation of a communication protocol tailored to the application. The formalism we use is ESTEREL, a synchronous reactive language dedicated to the description of real-time systems. Protocol description and verification using ESTEREL are described, as well as protocol optimization and implementation principles

Model Driven Communication Protocol Engineering and Simulation based Performance Analysis using UML 2.0

The automated functional and performance analysis of communication systems specified with some Formal Description Technique has long been the goal of telecommunication engineers. In the past SDL and Petri nets have been the most popular FDTs for the purpose. With the growth in popularity of UML the most obvious question to ask is whether one can translate one or more UML diagrams describing a system to a performance model. Until the advent of UML 2.0, that has been an impossible task since the semantics were not clear. Even though the UML semantics are still not clear for the purpose, with UML 2.0 now released and using ITU recommendation Z.109, we describe in this dissertation a methodology and tool called proSPEX (protocol Software Performance Engineering using XMI), for the design and performance analysis of communication protocols specified with UML. Our first consideration in the development of our methodology was to identify the roles of UML 2.0 diagrams in the performance modelling process. In addition, questions regarding the specification of non-functional duration contraints, or temporal aspects, were considered. We developed a semantic time model with which a lack of means of specifying communication delay and processing times in the language are addressed. Environmental characteristics such as channel bandwidth and buffer space can be specified and realistic assumptions are made regarding time and signal transfer. With proSPEX we aimed to integrate a commercial UML 2.0 model editing tool and a discrete-event simulation library. Such an approach has been advocated as being necessary in order to develop a closer integration of performance engineering with formal design and implementation methodologies. In order to realize the integration we firstly identified a suitable simulation library and then extended the library with features required to represent high-level SDL abstractions, such as extended finite state machines (EFSM) and signal addressing. In implementing proSPEX we filtered the XML output of our editor and used text templates for code generation. The filtering of the XML output and the need to extend our simulation library with EFSM abstractions was found to be significant implementation challenges. Lastly, in order to to illustrate the utility of proSPEX we conducted a performance analysis case-study in which the efficient short remote operations (ESRO) protocol is used in a wireless e-commerce scenario

Design and implementation of a TTCN to C translator

The conformance testing of a protocol implementation, may be logically divided into, the specification of the abstract test suite (ATS) from a formal descnption of the protocol, and the subsequent derivation of the executable test suite (ETS) from the ATS specification. Our concern here is with the latter step, in particular, the automatic derivation of an ATS expressed in the Tree and Tabular Combined Notation (TTCN) to an executable C language equivalent. This process is currently a manual one, and as a consequence is error prone, time consuming, often repetitive and not necessarily consistent. To overcome these problems, there exists the real need for a computer aided, and if possible, fully automatic solution. This study descnbes the design and implementation of a fully working TTCN subset to C language translator, which takes a TTCN ATS and produces an equivalent ETS, with a minimal amount of manual intervention. The methodology used is logically divided into three stages direct TTCN to C language mappings, implementation issues, including the generation of additional code to drive the above mappings, and test system implementation issues. The system was tested using parts of an ETSI ISDN LAPD ATS and the results showed considerable time savings against a similar manual implementation. In conclusion, suggestions are provided to the further development of the TTCN to C translator system, and discussion is given to the apphcation of this tool to a complete conformance testing system

Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Programming Languages and Software Tools : Kääriku, Estonia, August 23-24 1993

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