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Design of communication protocols using a message transfer pattern

Design patterns help to improve software quality and reduce development cost by reusing experience of experts for recurring problems. Patterns have potential to be useful in almost all areas of software systems, but to date they are mainly concentrated on the development of object‐oriented systems. In this paper, we apply the pattern concept to the description of communication protocols, particularly focusing on message interaction. We hypothesize that many communication protocols can be developed using a few recurring patterns to obtain an initial design description of a system. For the protocol description, we propose a set of patterns which are grouped in two categories: structural and behavioural patterns. A complex protocol can be obtained by composing such patterns. To show the usefulness of our patterns in a realistic application, we perform a case study for an ATM signalling protocol design. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.