This research project in communication protocols focuses on the study of formal modeling of communication protocols which spans the areas of protocol specification, verification, testing and performance. Goals of the project are to provide a unification of the formulation techniques across all of these areas from specification to testing and to add the capability of studying performance within the same kind of formulation. Currently the approaches used to formally specify a protocol are different from those used to verify the logical correctness of a protocol. There is also a gap between the verification formulations and the conformance test generation formulations. The research studies in this project are aimed at closing these two gaps and thereby providing a more integrated approach to the design of communication protocols from specification to verification to testing. In addition, the studies aim to allow one to investigate the performance of the protocol at an early stage of the design, again using the same formulation techniques as in specification and verification.
