Protocol composition revisited: A template-based transport architecture

Abstract

Protocol composition approaches promise to construct specialized protocols on-demand by combining existing protocol mechanisms as building blocks. While many proposal were made in the past twenty years, most of them haven't been widely used due to practical complexity. Yet the urge for modular protocol designs is still present to allow easier adoption of new algorithms within existing protocols, especially at the transport layer. In this paper, we describe a component-based design concept for protocols, where each protocol type defines a template for interacting protocol building blocks. In addition, we propose a detailed template for transport protocols that can accomodate mechanisms not available with TCP - both as an example and a design proposal of its own. With the discussion of variations of this transport protocol template, we show the benefit of this approach. In addition, we show simulatively that a specific behavior of an existing protocol configuration can be reproduced with this template.