Synthesis of communications protocols

Abstract

Protocol synthesis attempts to formalize and automate the process of designing communications protocols. Protocol design is an important step in the communications software or protocol engineering development process. Protocol synthesis has been addressed extensively by many researchers around the world, and various approaches have been proposed: from the stepwise refinement of a high level requirements specification to the automatic generation starting from a formal service specification. In this paper, we introduce protocol synthesis in the context of the protocol engineering process, and we briefly describe and survey the main features of the proposed synthesis methods. Tables summarizing this survey are also provided.