Engineering of Communication Systems and Protocols

Abstract

The complexity of the communication systems and protocols is increasing constantly, while the communication products' time-to-market is becoming shorter. Afterthoughts communication system redesign due to lack of performance is financially and time expensive, and it is unacceptable. This book chapter proposes a method for improving the telecommunication systems, by means of enhancement the performance of the protocols they rely on. The proposed engineering of communication systems is based on a formal method and it provides an early-phase performance evaluation of the underlying communication protocols. The methodology is illustrated through a hands-on case study conducted on an existing wireless communication system. The development and standardization of new telecommunication and information technologies is a rather complex process which requires a comprehensive framework (Sherif, 2001). The result of such a process is a new agreement that should satisfy all of the involved parties, such as: vendors, providers, and most importantly service users. To create a comprehensive communication standard and consequently a reliable communication system, many strategic and tactical issues need to be considered. The missing question is how to produce a standard that specifies a protocol or a system with high performance. The lack of performance issue might be a major cause for pitfall of entire communication systems. Most of the problems result from poor protocol specifications or from its enormous complexity. Furthermore, the design errors caused by the short and intensive creation period usually remain hidden until the testing and implementation phases of the communication product development. Fixing the problems after product's delivery for communication software and hardware increases the cost of the product by factor of 100 to 1000 compared to the fixing of the problem in the analysis phase.High performance communication protocols which are untainted of functional errors are crucial in the telecommunications sector where product expectation cycle is denominated in decades instead of years. In order to develop such a protocol, two aspects should be fulfilled: introduction of formal methods during the specification process and integration of the performance-related activities in the early phases of the communication system specification and development. The former one is already taking place as a result of the need www.intechopen.com Wireless Communications and Networks -Recent Advances