A systematic procedure that takes exponential time to synthesize protocol converters from formal specifications is presented. The algorithm proceeds in two steps: compute the largest common subset of services provided by the two mismatched protocols, and reduce the converter, retaining common services, without traversing the entire machine that represents the composition of the two mismatched protocols. In a number of cases, the converter can be constructed by a memoryless translation of messages from one protocol to another. Conditions under which such stateless conversion is possible are given. Two examples are presented to illustrate the techniques. In the first example, a converter that interconnects a half-duplex protocol with a full-duplex protocol from their formal specifications is computed. In the second example, the polynomial procedure is applied to computation of a converter for interconnecting the SNR and TCP protocols.
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