Communication Protocol Engineering

This well accepted book, now in its second edition, is a time-honoured revision and extension of the previous edition. With improved organization and enriched contents, the book primarily focuses on the concepts of design development of communication protocols or communication software. Beginning with an overview of protocol engineering, the text analyzes important topics such as • TCP/IP suite protocol structure. • Protocol specification. • Protocol specification languages like SDL, SPIN, Estelle, E-LOTOS, CPN, UML, etc. • Protocol verification and validation techniques like semantic models and reachability analysis. • Generating conformance test suite and its application to a running protocol implementation. Audience Communication Protocol Engineering is purely a text dedicated to the undergraduate students of electronics and communication engineering and computer engineering. The text is also of immense use to the postgraduate students of communication systems. Highlights of Second Edition • Incorporates latest and up-to-date information on the topics covered. • Includes a large number of figures and examples for easy understanding of concepts. • Presents some new sections like wireless protocol challenges, TCP protocol, verification of TCP, test execution, test case derivation, etc. • Involves extension of protocol specification languages like SPIN, Estelle, Uppaal etc.

As embedded systems become more and more complex, so does the challenge of enabling fast and efficient communication between the various subsystems that make up a modern embedded system. Facing this challenge from a practical standpoint, Communication Protocol Engineering outlines a hands-on methodology for developing effective communication protocols for large-scale systems. A Complete Roadmap This book brings together the leading methods and techniques developed from state-of-the-art methodologies for protocol engineering, from specification and description methods to cleanroom engineering and agile methods. Popovic leads you from conceptualization of requirements to analysis, design, implementation, testing, and verification. He covers the four main design languages: specifications and description language (SDL); message sequence charts (MSCs); tree and tabular combined notation (TTCN); and unified modeling language (UML). Practical Tools for Real Skills Fully illustrated with more than 150 figures, this guide also serves as a finite state machine (FSM) library programmer's reference manual. The author demonstrates how to build an FSM library, explains the components of such a library, and applies the principles to FSM library-based examples. Nowhere else are the fundamental principles of communication protocols so clearly and effectively applied to real systems development than in Communication Protocol Engineering. No matter in what stage of the process you find yourself, this is the ideal tool to make your systems successful.

Communication protocols form the operational basis of computer networks and telecommunication systems. They are behavior conventions that describe how communication systems interact with each other, defining the temporal order of the interactions and the formats of the data units exchanged – essentially they determine the efficiency and reliability of computer networks. Protocol Engineering is an important discipline covering the design, validation, and implementation of communication protocols. Part I of this book is devoted to the fundamentals of communication protocols, describing their working principles and implicitly also those of computer networks. The author introduces the concepts of service, protocol, layer, and layered architecture, and introduces the main elements required in the description of protocols using a model language. He then presents the most important protocol functions. Part II deals with the description of communication protocols, offering an overview of the various formal methods, the essence of Protocol Engineering. The author introduces the fundamental description methods, such as finite state machines, Petri nets, process calculi, and temporal logics, that are in part used as semantic models for formal description techniques. He then introduces one representative technique for each of the main description approaches, among others SDL and LOTOS, and surveys the use of UML for describing protocols. Part III covers the protocol life cycle and the most important development stages, presenting the reader with approaches for systematic protocol design, with various verification methods, with the main implementation techniques, and with strategies for their testing, in particular with conformance and interoperability tests, and the test description language TTCN. The author uses the simple data transfer example protocol XDT (eXample Data Transfer) throughout the book as a reference protocol to exemplify the various description techniques and to demonstrate important validation and implementation approaches. The book is an introduction to communication protocols and their development for undergraduate and graduate students of computer science and communication technology, and it is also a suitable reference for engineers and programmers. Most chapters contain exercises, and the author's accompanying website provides further online material including a complete formal description of the XDT protocol and an animated simulation visualizing its behavior.

Formal Methods for Protocol Engineering and Distributed Systems addresses formal description techniques (FDTs) applicable to distributed systems and communication protocols. It aims to present the state of the art in theory, application, tools an industrialization of FDTs. Among the important features presented are: FDT-based system and protocol engineering; FDT application to distributed systems; Protocol engineeering; Practical experience and case studies. Formal Methods for Protocol Engineering and Distributed Systems contains the proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Formal Description Techniques for Distributed Systems and Communication Protocols and Protocol Specification, Testing, and Verification, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and was held in Beijing, China, in October 1999. This volume is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on Distributed Systems or Communications, and as a reference for researchers and industry practitioners.

Communication protocols are rules whereby meaningful communication can be exchanged between different communicating entities. In general, they are complex and difficult to design and implement. Specifications of communication protocols written in a natural language (e.g. English) can be unclear or ambiguous, and may be subject to different interpretations. As a result, independent implementations of the same protocol may be incompatible. In addition, the complexity of protocols make them very hard to analyze in an informal way. There is, therefore, a need for precise and unambiguous specification using some formal languages. Many protocol implementations used in the field have almost suffered from failures, such as deadlocks. When the conditions in which the protocols work correctly have been changed, there has been no general method available for determining how they will work under the new conditions. It is necessary for protocol designers to have techniques and tools to detect errors in the early phase of design, because the later in the process that a fault is discovered, the greater the cost of rectifying it. Protocol verification is a process of checking whether the interactions of protocol entities, according to the protocol specification, do indeed satisfy certain properties or conditions which may be either general (e.g., absence of deadlock) or specific to the particular protocol system directly derived from the specification. In the 80s, an ISO (International Organization for Standardization) working group began a programme of work to develop formal languages which were suitable for Open Systems Interconnection (OSI). This group called such languages Formal Description Techniques (FDTs). Some of the objectives of ISO in developing FDTs were: enabling unambiguous, clear and precise descriptions of OSI protocol standards to be written, and allowing such specifications to be verified for correctness. There are two FDTs standardized by ISO: LOTOS and Estelle. Communication Protocol Specification and Verification is written to address the two issues discussed above: the needs to specify a protocol using an FDT and to verify its correctness in order to uncover specification errors in the early stage of a protocol development process. The readership primarily consists of advanced undergraduate students, postgraduate students, communication software developers, telecommunication engineers, EDP managers, researchers and software engineers. It is intended as an advanced undergraduate or postgraduate textbook, and a reference for communication protocol professionals.

This book provides comprehensive coverage of the protocols of communication systems. The book is divided into four parts. Part I covers the basic concepts of system and protocol design and specification, overviews the models and languages for informal and formal specification of protocols, and describes the specification language SDL. In the second part, the basic notions and properties of communication protocols and protocol stacks are explained, including the treatment of the logical correctness and the performance of protocols. In the third part, many methods for message transfer, on which specific communication protocols are based, are explained and formally specified in the SDL language. The fourth part provides for short descriptions of some specific protocols, mainly used in IP networks, in order to acquaint a reader with the practical use of communication methods presented in the third part of the book. The book is relevant to researchers, academics, professionals and students in communications engineering. Provides comprehensive yet granular coverage of the protocols of communication systems Allows readers the ability to understand the formal specification of communication protocols Specifies communication methods and protocols in the specification language SDL, giving readers practical tools to venture on their own

Honey bee colonies demonstrate robust adaptive efficient agent-based communications and task allocations without centralized controls – desirable features in network design. This book introduces a multipath routing algorithm for packet-switched telecommunication networks based on techniques observed in bee colonies. The algorithm, BeeHive, is dynamic, simple, efficient, robust and flexible, and it represents an important step towards intelligent networks that optimally manage resources. The author guides the reader in a survey of nature-inspired routing protocols and communication techniques observed in insect colonies. He then offers the design of a scalable framework for nature-inspired routing algorithms, and he examines a practical application using real networks of Linux routers. He also utilizes formal techniques to analytically model the performance of nature-inspired routing algorithms. In the last chapters of the book, he introduces an immune-inspired security framework for nature-inspired algorithms, and uses the wisdom of the hive for routing in ad hoc and sensor networks. Finally, the author provides a comprehensive bibliography to serve as a reference for nature-inspired solutions to networking problems. This book bridges the gap between natural computing and computer networking. What sets this book apart from other texts on this subject is its natural engineering approach in which the challenges and objectives of a real-world system are identified before its solution, nature-inspired or otherwise, is discussed. This balanced exposition of the book makes it equally suitable for telecommunication network designers and theorists, and computer science researchers engaged with artificial intelligence, agents, and nature-inspired techniques.