Tool for drawing protocol sequence diagrams

protocols sequence-diagram
hlovdal picture hlovdal · Sep 2, 2009 · Viewed 24k times · Source

I am looking for a tool to draw a sequence of packets sent for a sliding window protocol. There are many tools for drawing message sequence charts with horizontal lines, but I want to be able to draw the lines diagonally, like the the bottom part of this image:

SYN,SYN+ACK,ACK example

Please suggest suitable tools. I am most likely only interested in free ones, but if you have a really good suggestion for a commercial you can include that as well.

Answer

Sander picture Sander · Jun 30, 2013

mscgen can do this, using the arcgradient option. This snippet wil render the second part of your example exactly:

msc {
  arcgradient=20;

  client, server;
  client => server [label="SYN"];
  server => client [label="SYN + ACK"];
  client => server [label="ACK"];
}

If you copy paste this snippet in the mscgen_js on line demo, you'll see.

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