Modeling software for network serialization protocol design

Question

Hello,

I am currently designing a low level network serialization protocol (in fact, a refinement of an existing protocol).

As the work progress, pen and paper documents start to show their limits: i have tons of papers, new and outdated merged together, etc... And i can't show anything to anyone since i describe the protocol using my own notation (a mix of flow chart & C structures).

I need a software that would help me to design a network protocol. I should be able to create structures, fields, their sizes, their layout, etc... and the software would generate some nice UMLish diagrams.

Answer 1

Sorry to say, everything I've seen so far (various serial protocols for embedded devices/networks) has used Word documents, with plain old tables showing allocations of fields to the bytes in the message. Alternatively, I've seen it done in Excel documents! It works, and people can read it.

Unfortunately, that's not helpful for automatic code generation, unless you have a very strict format in e.g. an Excel doc that you can then parse with a tool to generate some code. It would be good to have a notation that can be easily machine parsed, as well as human readable.

For showing message handshaking and sequences, a UML sequence diagram is good of course. There are lots of tools readily available to help you with that part of it.