Challenges: automated design of networking protocols

This paper establishes a framework for the automated generation of networking protocols. The need for the rapid design of networking protocols in application-specific contexts has increased dramatically over the past five years. Each new application requires high performance in its own domain, as well as a rapid design cycle. Further, changes in physical layer technology quickly render previously high-performance protocols poor performance. Currently, there are no tools to automate the design of networking protocols. This paper addresses the challenge of building such tools. It proposes a methodology and a design chain for the automated generation of networking protocols, with the following novel ideas: (1) Formulation of the network protocol problem such that the exchange of protocol control information can be specified as part of the optimization program, (2) Optimal waveform generation, which specifies the optimal exchange of both control information and data, (3) Protocol Extraction: The extraction of the optimal protocol as a minimal description of the optimal waveforms. This methodology has the potential to dramatically change the future of networking protocol design by moving protocol design to a more abstract level, finding high-performance protocols not easily discovered by human intuition, and reducing the currently long protocol design cycles.