A DISCRETE-EVENT SYSTEMS-APPROACH FOR PROTOCOL CONVERSION

A protocol mismatch occurs when heterogeneous networks try to communic ate with each other. Such mismatches are inevitable due to the prolife ration of a multitude of networking architectures, hardware, and softw are on one hand, and the need for global connectivity on the other han d. In order to circumvent this problem the solution of protocol conver sion has been proposed. In this paper we present a systematic approach to protocol conversion using the theory of supervisory control of dis crete event systems, which was partially first addressed by Inan. We s tudy the problem of designing a converter for a given mismatched pair of protocols, using their specifications, and the specifications for t he channel and the user services. We introduce the notion of converter languages and use it to obtain a necessary and sufficient condition f or the existence of protocol converter and present an effective algori thm for computing it whenever it exists.