1983 Reports

CUPID: A Protocol Development Environment

Yemini, Yechiam; Nounou, Nihal

This paper describes research conducted towards Columbia's unified Protocol Implementation and Design (CUPID) environment. CUPID research aims at the integration and automation of protocol design and implementation tools. CUPID uses an algebraic representation of protocols based, in part, upon a variant of Milner's calculus of communicating systems (CCS). Communication behaviors are represented in terms of expressions of a universal algebra. A key notion to the automation of protocol development functions is that of a valuation over the algebra of communication behaviors. A valuation maps communication behaviors to expressions in other algebras (e.g., an algebra of delay distributions used for performance analysis). This allows one to proceed and compute attributes of communication behaviors over the respective algebras using a formal valuation process. We provide a brief introduction to CCS in the context of modelling protocol behaviors. This is followed by a brief summary of how the algebraic valuation mechanism may be used to support the different functions of a protocol design environment: multiple concurrent specifications, automated functional and performance analysis and automated test generation and performance simulation.