Constructive protocol specification using Cicero

This paper describes Cicero, a set of language constructs to allow constructive protocol specifications. Unlike other protocol specification languages, Cicero gives programmers explicit control over protocol execution, and facilitates both sequential and parallel implementations, especially for protocols above the transport-layer. It is intended to be used in conjunction with domain-specific libraries, and is quite different in philosophy and mode of use from existing protocol specification languages. A feature of Cicero is the use of event patterns to control synchrony, asynchrony, and concurrency in protocol execution, which helps programmers build robust protocol implementations. Event-pattern driven execution also enables implementers to exploit parallelism of varying grains in protocol execution. Event patterns can also be translated into other formal models, so that existing verification techniques may be used.