Protocol Specification with Formal Description Techniques

Abstract

At present, various means have been proposed for specifying services and protocols for the different layers in a communication system. The specifications form the basis for design validation and serve as references for implementors. For validating the correctness of implementations, tests can be derived from specifications. According to [Lisk86], a specification can be considered an abstraction from a set of implementations. The primary purpose of the abstraction is to focus on the functional requirements of a system that can be met in various ways by possible implementations [Viss86b]. To achieve this purpose, specifications need to be general enough so that they do not exclude admissible implementations unnecessarily, but also have to be restrictive enough to rule out unacceptable ones. Desirable properties of specifications include preciseness, consistency, completeness, and structuredness (compare [Brin88a]).