10 Design

Abstract

The protocol development process, as it was described in the previous chapter, contains several design phases: the service design, the protocol design, and the implementation design. Although the design phases comprise in detail many important and creative design decisions, relatively little attention has been paid to the design issue in the literature. Many publications use the word design in their headlines, but they refer more to the specification and the validation phase rather than to the design process itself. Nowadays protocols are still prevailingly developed empirically using more or less heuristic design methods. In contrast to the other phases of the development process, no established methods or techniques exist for protocol design. Therefore, we restrict ourselves in this chapter to a brief overview of interesting approaches related to systematic protocol design. Since the design process is closely related to the development of the (formal) protocol specification to document design decisions, we also discuss some issues concerning specification development in this chapter.