Georgia Tech: Networking & Telecommunications Group

Protocol Portability through Module Encapsulation

Bobby Krupczak, Ken Calvert, Mostafa Ammar

College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280

Overview

Because protocol software is difficult and expensive to implement and test, it is often ported between systems, instead of being rewritten from scratch. Unfortunately, porting protocol software can be nearly as difficult as from-scratch development, due to inherent differences in subsystem design and services provided. Thus, protocol subsystems can have a profound effect on the portability of a protocol implementation. This work proposes an approach permitting the incorporation of new protocols into a subsystem other than their ``native'' one, without the drawbacks or expense of porting and original development. This approach is based on protocol module encapsulation, which allows unmodified protocol code developed for one protocol subsystem to be used within another. This directory contains references and information on our experiences designing, implementing, and measuring the performance of our protocol encapsulation modules, using an AppleTalk protocol stack as a baseline.

Papers and Presentations

  • Bobby Krupczak, Ken Calvert, Mostafa Ammar. "Protocol Portability through Module Encapsulation",Technical Report GIT-CC-96-12, Georgia Institute of Technology, April, 1996.

  • Bobby® Krupczak, Ken Calvert, Mostafa Ammar. "Protocol Portability through Module Encapsulation", Proceedings of the International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP-96), Columbus, Ohio, October 29 - November 1, 1996. pg 56-63.

  • Bobby® Krupczak, Ken Calvert, Mostafa Ammar. "Increasing the Portability and Re-usability of Protocol Code", to appear in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

  • ICNP'96 Talk

The Distribution

The source code for our protocol encapsulation approach is not yet available for general distribution. Contact Bobby Krupczak (rdk@cc.gatech.edu) for more information. However, source code for our baseline AppleTalk protocol suite is available as part of our earlier work on Multi-Subsystem Protocol Architectures.

Figures, Performance Graphs, and Presentations

Below are figures depicting the overal design of a protocol encapsulation module as well as its instantiation for the BSD and Streams protocol subsystems.


Encapsulation Module Design


BSD Protocol Encapsulation Module

Using our BSD encapsulation module, we were able to construct the following native and hybrid protocol graphs.


Native and Hybrid Protocol Graphs constructed using BSD Protocol Encapsulation Modules

Postscript Figures:

Back to the Protocol Playground
Last updated by rdk Fri May 9 10:55:46 EDT 1997