An integration-oriented approach for designing communication protocols from component-based service specifications

The trend toward the enrichment of communication services in ISDN and IN has greatly increased the size and complexity of communication protocols which realize the services. A large and complex protocol is constructed by integrating components, each of which corresponds to a subfunction specified in a service specification. The conventional approach to this construction is to integrate components on the protocol level using the existing protocol integration methods. In this approach, the reachability analysis of protocol components is required in the integration stage. So if the size of components becomes large, the integration stage would be a bottleneck because of the state explosion problem of the reachability analysis. Therefore, we propose a new approach to construct the target protocol which, at first integrates components on the service specification level and then transforms an integrated service specification into the target protocol by the protocol synthesis technique. As a result, the construction of the target protocol from the component service specifications can be efficiently effected in a small state space without paying special attention to the timing of protocol messages.