A Sophisticated Environment for Protocol Simulation and Testing

Abstract

This paper describes a protocol development environment aimed at simplifying the development and testing of communication protocols. Protocols are defined in the development environment in a specification language, called BDL, which is based on the process algebra CCS. The behavior of a system is thus expressed in terms of communicating processes, and a rich set of analytical theories for verification are available. The BDL language and the simulator for the language are outlined in the paper. The interactive user interface, implemented on a graphical workstation, is presented. Further the paper describes an interface to the development environment which allows the simulator to interact with protocol implementations directly, and therefore enables protocol testing based on formal definitions