A black box framework for an application protocol stack

The article proposes a framework based design for implementing application protocol stacks. According to protocol specifications, network applications are usually conceived through a layered software architecture centered around the concept of messages sent or received asynchronously. Of particular interest are application protocols residing on transport protocols. When implementing several application protocols, one should look for software reuse in order to promote modular design and limited development effort. Such a goal is reached through the use of a software framework, providing a clear separation between reusable protocol-generic parts and isolated protocol-specific parts. Such a framework has been used to implement a protocol stack prototype. This latter experiment showed the power of a componentized object oriented framework and of common object oriented design patterns.