Generic engineering of communication protocols-current experience and future issues

We present an approach to the generic engineering of communication protocols, which combines pattern-based software engineering with the formal description technique (FDT) SDL. Our approach has the potential to reduce the effort for protocol design and assures the high quality of the resulting communication subsystem. Actually, we suggest to keep a pool of reusable SDL patterns, which use FDTs to describe generic solutions for recurring design problems. According to specific communication requirements a protocol designer can then select patterns, which are suitably adapted and finally composed to build part of the resulting protocol specification.