Design rules for producing logically complete two-process interactions and communications protocols

This paper addresses the problem of protocol failures that are caused by logically incompletely specified designs. A design is logically complete if it specifies all occurrable event (message) receptions under normal operating conditions. A more stringent requirement is that of dual completeness. A design is dually complete if it neither contains unspecified event receptions nor unspecified event transmissions. Rules for creating dually-complete designs are established and a design methodology based on these rules is proposed. The problem of designing interactions that involve interrupt-masked computations is also treated.