Currently, communication protocols are developed based on best practices, intuition, and discussion amongst developers. The performance of these protocols is then measured in terms of throughput, use of available bandwidth, scalability, etc. These measurements demonstrate the performance of a protocol but do not give any indication about the quality of the design of the protocol. During the design of a protocol no indications about the quality of the design are available and in order to perform measurements of the performance of a design, an implementations of protocols is required.
This project will investigate the development of design metrics for protocols that similar to software metrics express the quality of the design and implementation of a protocol and allow an objective discussion of the merits and drawbacks of a proposed design in comparison to other protocols.
Learning outcome: Knowledge of protocols and their current development process, Understanding of the software metrics, their application to software and the evaluation of protocol design.