During this project, a methodology has been developed for designing and implementing communication protocols with the use of Object-Oriented techniques and the UML notation. Certain extensions to the UML notation have been proposed in order for the peculiarities of protocol engineering to be dealt with. These extensions include leveled Object Interaction Diagrams (OIDs) as well as a design level OID that captures the semantics of concurrency and synchronization.

We have successfully applied our proposed methodology to the development of OOTCP (Object-Oriented TCP), a TCP layer for the RTLinux real-time operating system. The resulting implementation not only has enhanced readability, modularity, and expandability but also presents performance characteristics comparable with those of the corresponding protocol stack of Linux, even though no extra optimization techniques were used to enhance performance.