Model-Driven Protocol Design Based on Component Oriented Modeling

Abstract

Due to new emerging areas in the communication field there is a constant need for the design of novel communication protocols. This demands techniques for a rapid and efficient protocol design and development. Systematic protocol designs using formal description techniques (FDTs), such as SDL, LOTOS, etc., have proven a successful way to develop correct protocols. FDTs enforce, however, a semantic-oriented description which makes it difficult to reuse parts of the specification of other FDTs. A general-purpose modeling language like the UML may help to easily bridge between different description techniques. In contrast to the standardized FDTs, UML lacks a formal semantics. A model-driven protocol design, which aims at supporting the reuse of designs, makes only sense, when the designs of basic protocol mechanisms fit in reusable design patterns or components with a formally defined semantics. In this paper, we propose a component based protocol development approach with UML. Typical structures and behaviors of protocols are pre-defined as components using UML diagrams. The semantics of the UML diagrams is formally defined using the compositional Temporal Logic of Actions (cTLA). Based on this formalization, transformation into other presentations, e.g. Promela for verification, are supported. We demonstrate the approach for an example transfer protocol.