A semantic model for safe protocol interaction

Most communication subsystems support modular and reconfigurable communication protocols based on the Lego block model. In this model, complex protocols are built as collections of simpler protocols. However, protocol behavior is often expressed via informal descriptions and few work has been done to develop the underlying semantics that enables us to model and reason about protocol interactions. Without it, it is very difficult to identify critical properties that must be met for correct operation. In this paper we present a communication framework based on a semantic model of distributed object reflection and we illustrate how this model can be used to formalize and reason about interactions between communication protocols. We evaluate the overhead and feasibility of our approach by developing an abstract executable specification of the communication framework in Maude [3] and a Maude API to systematically translate Maude code into Java. This gives us two versions of our model to play with: an abstract one for analysis and a concrete one for real-world applications.