Integration Through Meta-Communication

A variety of communications architectures, protocols, and management systems necessitates methods and tools for integration of these communications systems components on a variety of different integration levels. No general integration methods exist today which are applicable to the integration of architectures, protocols, and systems. In this article we argue that metacommunication, i.e. communication about communication rules, is such a general integration methodology. We summarize our efforts towards the development of an automated methodology for meta-communication. We view meta-communication as a distributed design problem. Meta-communicating entities exchange partially specified communication rules. Each entity, or a metacommunication center, applies a standard composition principle on the individual partially specified mles in order to derive the complete protocol architecture. We report on an existing implementation of the metacommunication mechanism and on translators that transform the resulting specification into C code.