Deriving protocol converters for communications gateways

Gateways are introduced for interworking between several, possibly heterogeneous, distributed computer systems. A gateway has to provide for the necessary adaptation between the communication protocols used in the interconnected networks. The adaptation problem is best handled by considering the communication services of the interconnected systems. Once the problem is solved at this level, the remaining problem of conversion between the incompatible communication protocols used in the different systems can be solved automatically, as demonstrated for the case of a simple example of data transmission service from a sender to a receiver process