Sttyciar: A low-level object-oriented network programming framework

A new network application programming framework, called Sttyciar, is designed and implemented. Sttyciar is developed to be re-usable and easily extensible, wrapping the procedural pcap library to provide an intuitive object-oriented interface to the receiving and transmitting functionality of network interfaces attached to a host computer. The framework's layered architecture, which includes features such as buffering and statistic calculation, is detailed and a performance analysis on its capabilities is carried out. The framework is shown to be capable of operating with a throughput in excess of 100 Mbps, but this performance is dependent on the speed and architecture of the computer. The use of multi-threading and Sttyciar's ability to scale to processors with multiple cores is also outlined. Potential performance and structure improvements are identified but the framework is found to be suitable to support applications operating in live networking environments.