Development Tools For Communication Protocols

The past decade has witnessed a surge in research efforts aimed at developing tools to aid the designer of communication protocols. Most of these efforts have been directed towards designing individual tools. Recently, however, there has been a growing interest in building development environments that support an integrated set of such tools. This paper presents a survey of commonly used protocol development tools. Two categories of protocol development tools are examined: construction tools to successively refine communication protocols from specifications to working systems and validation tools to assess whether the refinements meet functional and performance protocol objectives. Construction tools surveyed include tools for specification, synthesis, and implementation. Validation tools surveyed include tools for formal verification, performance analysis and testing. A simple send-and-wait protocol is used as an example throughout the paper