Abstract Communication Model for Distributed Systems

U. Glasser, Y. Gurevich, M. Veanes
2004 IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering  
In some distributed and mobile communication models, a message disappears in one place and miraculously appears in another. In reality, of course, there are no miracles. A message goes from one network to another; it can be lost or corrupted in the process. Here, we present a realistic but high-level communication model where abstract communicators represent various nets and subnets. The model was originally developed in the process of specifying a particular network architecture, namely, the
more » ... iversal Plug and Play architecture. But, it is general. Our contention is that every message-based distributed system, properly abstracted, gives rise to a specialization of our abstract communication model. The purpose of the abstract communication model is not to design a new kind of network; rather, it is to discover the common part of all message-based communication networks. The generality of the model has been confirmed by its successful reuse for very different distributed architectures. The model is based on distributed abstract state machines. It is implemented in the specification language AsmL and is used for testing distributed systems. Index Terms-Abstract state machines, communication protocols, computer networks, distributed systems, requirement specification, system modeling, testing of distributed systems. ae INTRODUCTION A couple of years ago, the group on Foundations of Software Engineering at Microsoft Research (FSE) and, in particular, the authors of the present paper worked on a high-level model of the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) architecture [39] , [20] . It occurred to us that the UPnP communication model is a specialization of an abstract communication model (ACM) that is so general that every distributed system that involves a communication network gives rise to a specialization of ACM. The simple examples that we could think of confirmed our thesis. Various projects that FSE worked on after that provided additional and more convincing confirmation. One example is an
doi:10.1109/tse.2004.25 fatcat:qiqzx5rm5za4lfrsu532ovdcwy