Procedure-based development platform for communication protocol stack software

This paper presents a novel approach for developing a communication protocol stack efficiently. In this approach, a communication protocol stack is implemented directly from the message sequence chart (MSC) describing its behavior. To verify the proposed approach, we implemented a procedure-based development platform composed of MSC design tool, protocol stack framework, test framework, and MSC extractor. Procedures and their dependencies are specified through the MSC design tool during the design phase. They are translated into data structures and template codes which the protocol stack framework can handle during the implementation phase. These are further reused in the test framework with test configuration at the test phase. The test framework also supports reproduction tests with extracted MSCs from the test logs. This approach enables users to examine the system behavior by comparing MSCs — one drawn during the design phase and the other collected under the test phase, which makes it easier for the users to revise the design based on the test result. Finally, a virtuous development cycle is accomplished for the development process of protocol stack from the design to the test. We show that our platform is superior to FSM-based framework in terms of traceability, maintainability, and productivity by implementing LTE RRC protocol using both frameworks.