Synthesis of communications gateways using the Petri net model

Because of the proliferation of proprietary network architectures and protocols, there is an urgent need for constructing communication gateways to ensure the interoperability among such networks and protocols. Various formal methods have been introduced in the literature to deal with the derivation of gateways. Most of these methods use the communicating finite state machine (CFSM) model to describe the different protocols and services involved in the conversion process. However, CFSMs suffer from the state explosion problem and cannot express concurrent behavior. Therefore most of the available methods do not scale up to large and concurrent protocols and services. To eliminate those problems, the authors advocate the use of the Petri net (PN) model as a specification formalism to be used in the design of the gateway. They present a gateway synthesis approach (which starts from the PN specification of the services and protocols) to reconciliate and use some net transformation rules to synthesize the gateway. An illustrative example is provided.<>