A protocol machine configurator for highly flexible transport protocol

The concepts of functional decomposition and selective functionality for the high speed transport protocol have been proposed; along these lines, we implement a protocol machine configurator (PMC) that can configure a protocol machine to be adaptive in the given environment (for multimedia application). For efficiency and flexibility, the operation of this PMC is divided into two steps: protocol function (PF) selection, and mechanism selection. In the PF selection step, PFs, which are required for supporting a certain transport protocol service class, are added to an active function set (AFS) which is the set of the enabled PFs. In the mechanism selection step, only one mechanism in the multi-mechanism protocol function (MMPF), which has multiple mechanisms, is selected to satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirements such as the delay bound and error tolerance level per media type. By dividing the configuration of the protocol machine into steps, the PMC can determine definitely which PF is to be selected according to the transport protocol service class and determine flexibly which mechanism in each MMPF is to be selected by the QoS limits. Eventually, the PMC can adaptively configure the protocol machine per connection with the selected PFs and mechanisms.