Design for an application protocol stack framework

This article describes a framework design for implementing application protocol stacks. Following protocol specifications, network applications are typically modeled through a layered software architecture built on the notion of messages, sent or received asynchronously. Due to the extensive number of application protocols, design guidelines advocate software reuse in order to promote modular design and limited development effort. Such a goal is actually achieved thanks to a software framework, promoting a clean separation between reusable protocol-generic parts and isolated protocol-specific parts. Such a framework is used to implement different application protocol stack prototypes. Those experiments showed the power of a componentized object-oriented framework and of common object-oriented design patterns