Derivation of Abstract Protocol Type Definitions for the Conformance Testing of Text-Based Protocols

In today’s specification and implementation of conformance test systems the derivation of a proper abstract protocol type definition for text-based protocols remains an open issue. Contrary to conventional telecommunication protocol standards, text-based protocol standards do not specify such an abstract protocol syntax but instead its transfer syntax, i.e., information about message content in conjunction with its encoding. We present in this paper an approach, which allows to extract an abstract protocol type definition from a text-based protocol transfer syntax specified using the Augmented Backus Naur Form (ABNF). In addition, we briefly discuss how a protocol independent codec system can be implemented based for such protocol type definitions.