Computer Communications Laboratory

/ Behcet Sarikaya / Professor
/ Senro Saito / Associate Professor

The Computer Communications Laboratory is involved with education and research on all aspects of computer communications. Ongoing projects in education include an SCCP project on Social Hyper-networking and two topdown courseware design projects one on High-speed Network Courseware Design for Synthetic Worlds and another on authoring system AuthCAL for topdown courseware development environments.

The social hyper-networking project aims at providing communication facilities such as electronic mail, voice mail, electronic conference, bulletin board, real time talk and facsimile. The AuthCAL project has the goal of providing an object oriented graphical user interface and programming tools to make some teaching materials. The high-speed network courseware project aims at designing graduate and undergarduate level courses to teach the basics of high-speed networking.

In research, all aspects of computer networking are being investigated. However, present interest areas are concentrated on:

• Multimedia communication systems. Multimedia synchronization, application of protocol engineering techniques to multimedia systems design, verification and testing;
• Network management protocols. Network management using internet methodology, test design and implementation of network management systems, test design for the management information bases;
• Communication systems for virtual reality.
• Audio-visual network architecture. Cross analog and digital transmission network; audio-visual communication protocol modelling on the OSI reference model.

We are doing collaborative research with several Japanese and foreign universities and research centers. In Japan, our partner researchers work in Shizuoka, Tohoku and Osaka Universities and the Advanced Institute of Communications in Sendai. Overseas, we collaborate with Protocol Test Center in Montreal, Canada; Sherbrooke University in Sherbrooke, Canada; Northern Telecom in Istanbul, Turkey; and Magdeburg University in Magdeburg, Germany.

The Computer Communications Laboratory presently has the following equipment and software systems:

• Equipment: Multimedia workstation SGI Indy Protocol testing workstation Sun SPARCstation 10(2CPU) Network management workstation Sun SPARCstation 10 GUI Modelling workstation Sun SPARCstation LX SHN project server Sun SPARCstation IPX Authoring system workstation Apple Quadra800 Windows application PC Gateway 2000 DTP PC Dynabook V486A x 2
• Software systems: GUI design tool Syclops2 EUC platform ATSON-1 Network management tool SunNet Manager

Refereed Journal Papers

1. M. Bilgic and B. Sarikaya. Performance comparison of asn.1 encoders/decoders using ftam. Computer Communications, 16(4):229-240, 1993.

   Syntax Notation-One(ASN.1) is a standard external data representation language used to define messages of application layer protocols. Its encoding rules, the Basic Encoding Rules (BER), are also international standards that define the encoding/decoding of data values into/from a transfer syntax. Various approaches to automating BER encoding/decoding are examined; in particular, two widely used software packages (ISODE and CASN1) are studied. A hardware BER encoder/decoder called VASN is presented. Performance of software and hardware approaches are evaluated on real instances of file transfer using a standard FTAM protocol. Benchmarks obtained from running CASN1 on one of the fastest workstations and from running VHDL simulations of VASN1 indicate the superiority of the hardware approach.

   
   

2. K. Naik and B. Sarikaya. Test case verification by model checking. Formal Methods in System Design, 1(2):277-321, 1993.

   Verification of a test case for testing the conformance of protocol implementations against the formal description of the protocol involves verifying three aspects of the test case: expected input/output test behaviour, test verdicts, and the test purpose. We model the safety and liveness properties of a test case using branching temporal logic. There are four types of safety properties: transmission safety, reception safety, synchronization safety, and verdict safety. We model a test purpose as a liveness property and give a set of notations to formally specify a test purpose. All these properties expressed as temporal formulas are verified using model checking on an extended state machine graph representing the composed behaviour of a test case and protocol specification. This methodology is shown to be effective in finding errorss in manually developed conformance test suites.

Refereed Proceeding Papers

1. Behcet Sarikaya. Test design using sdl-88 and sdl-92. In Ove Faergemand and Amerdeo Sarma, editors, Tutorial Notes of 6th SDL Forum, pages 21-40. Telekom FTZ, Telekom FTZ, Germany, October 1993.

   OSI conformance test design based on SDL-88 is introduced. Several steps in the design process are identified and shortly explained. Next, the method is extended to SDL-92. The technique used is to transform SDL-92 specifications into SDL-88 specifications. The transformations are applied to the access control system and the ODP trader specifications.

Books

1. Behcet Sarikaya. Principles of Protocol Engineering and Conformance Testing. Ellis Horwood, Ellis Horwood Limited, Campus 400, Maylands Avenue, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, UK HP2 7EZ, 1993.

Technical Reports

1. B. Sarikaya. Odp trader test generation using osdl to sdl-88 transformations. 93-2-001, The University of Aizu, 1993.

   
   

2. B. Sarikaya and M. Bilgic. Concurrent algorithms for asn.1 encoding and decoding. 93-2-002, The University of Aizu, 1993.

Doctoral Dissertations Advised

1. Satoru Wakiyama. The Information System for an Autonomous Network Operation of the basis of a notional model of the Information Resource, Univ. of Electro-communications, 1994.

   Thesis Advisor: S. Saito.

Others

1. Senro Saito. Grant, 1993.

   Grant for Scientific Research by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. No. 05302065.

   
   

2. Senro Saito, 1993.

   Investigation report of improvment in the information and communication network of the gaverment office quarter, editing by Public Building Association, June, 1993.