STEPS: a software tool-set for automated protocol synthesis

Abstract

Protocol synthesis represents an important alternative to the classical design process based on reachability analysis where the fundamental drawback is the exponential growth of reachable states. In order to demonstrate the usefulness and the feasibility of the protocol synthesis approach presented by Kahlouche and Girardot (see IEEE INFOCOM'1996, p.1165-73, 1996), we have developed a software tool-set for automated protocol synthesis called STEPS which supports our synthesis approach. The aim of this paper is to present the functionalities and an experimentation of STEPS. We also propose a new protocol development methodology based on our synthesis approach.