ECSE: an efficient environment for layered communication protocols

The authors present the European Networking Center Communication Systems Environment (ECSE), an environment for developing communications software. ECSE aims at three goals: portability, efficiency, and extensibility. The first goal is achieved by providing a shell interface to access the appropriate subset of elementary operating system services. ECSE enables efficiency by providing a set of basic services designed to interact efficiently, and which allow extended services to be integrated efficiently. The ECSE architecture is extensible in two ways: vertically to allow alternative implementations of an existing service, and horizontally, to allow integration of new services into the environment. So far, ECSE has been designed and developed for multilayered communication implementations in single-processor environments