Protocol Composition Frameworks, A Header Driven Model

Protocol composition frameworks provide off-the-shelf composable protocols to simplify the development of custom protocol stacks. All recent protocol frameworks use a general-purpose event-driven model to manage the interactions between protocols. In complex compositions, where protocols offer their service to more than one other protocol, the one-to-many interaction scheme of the event-driven model introduces composition problems by mixing up the targets to which data (list of headers) should be delivered. To solve these problems, we propose to shift the driving force behind interactions from the events to the headers they carry. We show that the resulting domain-specific header-driven model solves the composition problems, provides statically typed header handling and enhances protocol readability.