A tool framework for generation of application optimized communication protocols

Abstract

Communication networks and their services have been developing from user centric systems to a conglomerate of heterogeneous entities. Nowadays the end user device is only one participant. All communicating entities define services of arbitrary complexity by arranging the set of available functionalities according to the requested solution. Recently sensor networks have gathered a lot of attention to provide to "the network" some needed environmental information to enable value added location based services. This evolution has also introduced embedded systems to participate and supplement existing networks. In favour of these systems (which are lightweight usually), this paper proposes an algorithmic and tooling approach to define and implement communication protocols which are tailored to the specific needs of a given application. This approach, compared to general purpose protocols, reduces the communication overhead significantly. Side effects as energy saving may become crucial if long sustainability of an autonomous service is a major goal. Meanwhile, the database defining the application protocol is kept at a high abstraction level such as an XML document in case of the given examples.