An Intermediary Protocol Representation to Aid in Avionics Network Development

Complex networked systems like aircraft or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) often employ purpose-built network protocols. To eliminate design or implementation errors, general-purpose and domain-specific simulation/analysis tools are used. For newly developed protocols, these require dedicated configuration posing another source of errors and being cumbersome due to tool-specific protocol representations.As a first step towards alleviating this problem, we propose an Intermediary Protocol Representation (InPR) that can be generated programmatically, i.e., from existing machine-readable protocol specifications. An InPR can serve as the single basis for generating protocol specifications for other analysis tools, reducing the recurring implementation overhead.For demonstration purposes, we design and implement an InPR for protocols appearing in the aerospace industry and showcase how it can drive certain analysis tasks by itself or by generating configurations for other analysis tools.