Flexible Active–Passive and Push–Pull Protocols

By means of a simple buffer design, we show that
active versus passive
and
push versus pull
settings in asynchronous communication protocols, also known as handshake protocols, can be controlled by initialization. We advocate postponing initialization until run time and show that postponement simplifies the design and design process and serves test, debug, and analysis. We design the buffer as a network of communication channels with storage, called
Links
, and storage-free computation modules, called
Joints
. We describe the behaviors of Links and Joints using a
shared variable model
presented here for the first time.