Applying MDE Methodologies to Design Communication Protocols for Distributed Systems

Abstract

Traditionally, protocol engineers have to deal with the design and implementation of complex network services, spending considerable time and effort on creating robust and reliable final source code. Although approaches exist to assist engineers in the development of communication protocols which use several object-oriented frameworks, these do not benefit from new modelling guidelines developed in MDE and UML to exploit automatic code generation from graphical models. This paper introduces a new UML2 profile for communications which guides the construction of software for communications following the client-server architecture. The MDE process is then used to design suitable platform-specific models for the well-known Adaptive Communications Environment (ACE), a high performance C++ toolkit for implementing concurrent and network applications which relies heavily on architectural patterns