Communicating Systems with UML 2: Modeling and Analysis of Network Protocols

Preface

Advanced distributed architectures such as mobile embedded systems are becoming more and more complex but always need to keep the same quality. The design of such systems requires a full understanding of their internal behaviors and global interactions, and a mastery of how to represent, analyze and validate them, as well as an understanding of the accuracy of communicating entities and protocols.

Current books on network protocols give a basic knowledge of communication systems and present existing protocols layer by layer, but without explaining how to fully validate the communication mechanisms between them. A few books propose the use of a formal model to design protocols but they do not explain how these models can be created. Furthermore, these formal methods are not always fully adapted to modern high level programming languages, based on the object-oriented paradigm. The design software engineering approach required needs to integrate an object-oriented methodology and a protocol description language. Fortunately, both of these requirements are now provided by the Unified Modeling Language, or UML.

The UML language is composed of a simple and clear set of diagrams allowing a designer to easily model protocol mechanisms and architectures. UML is currently supported by an increasing set of description and analysis methods and tools.

This book not only presents a set of diagrams but helps the reader first to discover which diagrams to use for what kind of problem, ...