Modeling communications protocols using the Unified Modeling Language

Specifying communications protocols is a very important step of the protocol development process and protocol engineering. A rigorous specification would result in a more reliable and highly maintainable implementation, and hence would reduce the time and cost required for performing the development and maintenance activities. In this paper, we propose the use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) (Booch et al. 1999) for the specification documentation and elicitation of behavioral, structural and architectural models covering both the static and dynamic aspects of protocols. We illustrate the use of UML using a simple communication service and protocol.