IMPROVING THE EFFICIENCY OF AUTOMATED PROTOCOL IMPLEMENTATION USING ESTELLE

Correctness and runtime efficiency are essential properties of softwar e in general and of high-speed protocols in particular. Establishing c orrectness requires the use of FDTs during protocol design, and to pro ve the protocol code correct with respect to its formal specification. Another approach to boost confidence in the correctness of the implem entation is to generate protocol code automatically from the specifica tion. However, the runtime efficiency of this code is often insufficie nt. This has turned out to be a major obstacle to the use of FDTs in p ractice. One of the FDTs currently applied to communication protocols is Estelle. We show how runtime efficiency can be significantly improv ed by several measures carried out during the design, implementation a nd runtime of a protocol. Recent results of improvements in the effici ency of Estelle-based protocol implementations are extended and interp reted.