Automatic synthesis of protocol specifications from service specifications

The authors introduce a novel method for the synthesis of protocol entity specifications starting from the service specification. Both protocol and service specifications are modeled by deterministic finite state machines. The interactions between the protocol entities and the service users are tightly or strongly synchronized. However the interactions among the protocol entities are based on the sending and the eventual reception of protocol messages via the underlying FIFO (first-in first-out) communication medium. The derived protocol specifications are proven to be semantically correct, meaning that the interacting protocol entities provide the specified service, and syntactically correct, meaning that no design errors, such as deadlocks or unspecified receptions, can occur during the interaction among the derived protocol entities. The application of the new method to the association control service is also presented.<>