The constantly growing complexity of distributed and telecommunications applications has made it necessary to develop high-level application-oriented languages and tools. There exists a number of standardized languages and their implementations, but usually they focus just on some rather narrow aspect of the problem. This makes it necessary to use several unrelated languages and environments when implementing a nontrivial distributed application.
This research project develops Kannel, an integrated language for the design and implementation of communications protocols. The main features of Kannel are high-level application support, object-orientation, and visual notations. In contrast to conventional languages in the area, Kannel and its programming environment provide facilities for all the main tasks in a typical protocol development effort.
The first version of Kannel has been designed and implemented. The implementation entails a visual Kannel editor and a translator into C++. A graphical interpretive simulator and an integration with the protocol development environment CVOPS, developed at VTT in Finland, are currently under implementation. The main implementation language in the project is C++. The research has been constructive rather than theoretical, trying to achieve a practical tool set for protocol engineering. That is why the project has been closely tied to an industrial steering group consisting of members from Nokia Research Center, Nokia Telecommunications, Nokia Mobile Phones, Nokia Cellular Systems, Telecom Finland, Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT), and X-NET Ltd. The main funding has come from the Technology Development Centre (TEKES, 1992-95) and from the Academy of Finland (1995-96).
The project is being carried out at two universities: Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki (UH), and Department of Information Technology, Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT). The research is organized roughly such that UH concentrates on the language issues, while the protocol side is taken care by LUT. The members of the research group are Assoc. prof. Jukka Paakki (UH), M.Sc. Kari Granö (UH), M.Sc. Antti-Pekka Tuovinen (UH), Prof. Jarmo Harju (LUT), and M.Sc.Eng. Jari Kuittinen (LUT). Publications: [3, 4, 15, 16, 50-53].
Home page: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/research/kannel/