AN OBJECT-ORIENTED APPROACH TO CONSTRUCTING COMMUNICATION PROTOCOLS

The development of communication protocols for computer networks and d istributed systems is an increasingly complex and cost-sensitive proce ss. This paper presents an object-oriented concurrent (OOC) model for the development of communication protocols. This model consists of thr ee kinds of entities: data entities, which represent the communicated data units, state entities, which describe their behavior, and connect ion, entities, which are responsible for communication services. The s tate transitions in a protocol are modeled by using state entities, an d a communication service is performed by a group of connection and st ate entities. A C++ library based on our OOC model is described that c ontains three class hierarchies, for data, state; and connection entit ies, respectively In addition, an approach to constructing a protocol using this OOC model and the library is presented. An example in which a T.62 protocol is constructed shows that this approach provides a hi gh level of modeling, concurrency, and reusability.