It is clear that the recent advances in communications, workstations and distributed systems put a stringent constraint concerning the performance and the flexibility of communication protocols.
The project will study the communication requirements of a wide range of applications. A specification of these requirements can be drawn using formal description techniques using a suitable formal language. Early implementations of integrated protocols will allow to experiment the techniques for communication code optimizations in order to determine the likely speed-ups when a compiler is used. An important research issue is also to investigate into execution environments for optimizing integrated protocol implementation. The next task will be to develop the protocol architecture i.e. how a protocol profile can be synthesized from basic building blocks in order to meet the application requirements. Once the architecture and language study are completed, the techniques will be used to build a compiler that automatically generates the integrated protocol implementation of the communication module based on the application requirements and on the hand optimized building blocks. Formal description techniques will be used to generate test suites for the generated system.
Corresponding to these issues four workpackages have been identified:
A workpackage (WP E) deals with the management of the project. In subsections 2.2 to 2.6, we give detailed description of workpackages A to E, respectively. A detailed workplan for the first year and a workplan for the second year of the project are described in section 2.7.