Communications protocol system integration, interface and interoperability

Heterogeneous communications protocol systems are integrated together to fulfill complex tasks and their interoperability is a major hurdle for the network reliability and quality of services. After a general overview, I shall discuss an approach to this problem using a formal approach. Based on the characteristics of the application domain we identify a new equivalence relation of states of non-deterministic systems and design a polynomial time minimization algorithm to deal with the state explosion problem for formal analysis. We apply our technique to GMPLS protocols and obtain a significant state space reduction. We discuss integrated system verification and interoperability testing with the minimized state system without resorting to the global state space information.