Date of Award

Spring 1997

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Mathematics

Abstract

Computers communicate with each other over various communication networks via a language known as a protocol. The design of the protocol can have a significant impact on the efficiency (and effectiveness) of the network. Because building an actual network to test the performance (and reliability) of a new protocol is rather expensive and time consuming, there is an interest in simulating network protocols in order to determine how efficient the communication network is. We are therefore interested in automatically generating simulators that could measure the performance of the new protocols. There are two main parts to this project. The first part is designing and developing a library of general simulation constructs for packet based networks. A packet based network is a network where the information is transmitted in sometimes variable length units called packets. This library should be useful in its own right for the construction of custom simulation programs, but it is primarily intended to aid in the automatic generation of simulators. This library is called the RunTime Simulation Library (RTSL). The second part is to develop a process whereby a formal specification of a protocol's behavior can be automatically translated into a program that simulates the protocol's performance. Alternatively this could be viewed as an automatic simulator generation tool that generates code which uses the library of general simulation constructs. In general such a tool will be referred to as a Protocol Description Language (PDL) translator.

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