One important theoretical area in the field of network management and control is the management of protocols. The principal investigator of this research will consider prevention, diagnosis, and correction of protocol faults and inefficiencies, from a network management perspective. In the context of this research, the concept of "protocol" refers to any system hardware and software that can be modelled by communication finite state machines. The research will address three problems: 1. the distributed diagnosis of protocol faults in distributed systems, 2. the synthesis of protocols whose performance can be controlled, and 3 the generation of test cases for input output testing of protocols for verification and certification. The work builds on classical results of protocol analysis and synthesis, but seeks new formulations and solutions within the framework of network management.
