Development Tools for Communication Protocols: An Overview

This paper presents an overview of commonly used protocol development tools falling under two categories: construction tools and validation tools. Construction tools are used to develop protocols from specifications to working systems. They include tools for specification synthesis and implementation. Validation tools are used to analyze protocols behavior. They include tools for formal verification, performance evaluation and testing. For each tool, we examine the key underlying issues, outline the main approaches, and illustrate its application to a send-and wait protocol