ON CONSTRUCTING COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS FROM COMPONENT-BASED SERVICE SPECIFICATIONS

Constructing communication protocols from component service specificat ions, each of which specifies a subfunction of the target protocol, en ables efficient development of a large and complex communication proto col. Concerning this construction, related techniques have been alread y proposed: integration of component protocol specifications into a si ngle protocol specification and transformation of service specificatio ns to protocol specifications. However, the integration needs special knowledge of communication protocols, and the transformation requires that a large and complex service specification should be developed as input to produce the target protocol. In order to cope with these prob lems, this paper proposes a new method which at first integrates compo nent service specifications into a single service specification, and t hen transforms the service specification into the target protocol by a protocol synthesis technique. The most important point of view is tha t component integration is performed at the service specification leve l rather than the protocol specification level. Additionally, we defin e a class of 'welI-formed' service specification which ensures correct ness of the target protocol. As a result, the integration and transfor mation can be efficiently executed in small state space without specia l knowledge of communication protocols. Finally, we have shown the eff ectiveness of the proposed method by constructing a part of the real-l ife OSI protocol FTAM.