Historical Overview of Data Communication With Analysis of a Selective Repeat Protocol

This thesis is primarily divided into two parts. The first part provides an overview of the historical milestones in the development of the telecommunications industry the computer industry, primarily the hardware technology, and the merging of the two industries. The milestones chosen and the details given were motivated by the current trends regarding the consolidation of the two fields of telecommunications and computers into the area which is referred to as data communications. The second part of the thesis is an analysis of a specification for a data link communications protocol, specifically the sliding window selective repeat protocol. The specification was modeled using the systems of communicating machines. This model uses a combination of finite state machines and variables which allows the size of the specification to be linear in the window size. The analysis used is a system state analysis, similar to the reachability analysis of the pure finite state model. The resulting system state analysis was reviewed for an underlying graph structure. The graph found was defined and an inductive proof developed to extend the analysis of the protocol for a window size of all nonnegative integers w. Telecommunications History, Computer History, Sliding Window Protocol, Systems of Communicating Machines, Selective Repeat Protocol.