A class-chest for deriving transport protocols

Abstract

The development of new transport protocols or protocol algorithms suffers from the complexity of the environment in which they an intended to run. Modeling techniques attempt to avoid this by simulating the environment. Another approach to promoting rapid prototyping of protocols and protocol algorithms is to provide a pre-built infrastructure that is common to transport protocols, so that the focus is placed on the protocol-specific aspects. The Meta-Transport Library is a library of C++ base classes that implement or abstract out the mundane functions of a protocol; new protocol implementations are derived from the base classes. The result is a fully viable user-level transport protocol implementation, with emphasis on modularity. The collection of base classes form a "class-chest" of tools from which protocols can be developed and studied with as little change to a normal Unix environment as possible.