The design of a uniform interface between adjacent layers [protocols]

A functional analysis and design schemata are presented for a generic communicating entity with the aims of characterizing its elementary components, suggesting their organization, providing a general model to design protocols, and exploiting the functional decomposition to locate the elements which can be treated as being layer independent and used as modular components of the design. In line with that, the interface between adjacent layers is considered as an abstract data type to provide information hiding, a uniform module independent of the layer and to allow easy tuning and dimensioning of the system by means of simulation. The proposed functional analysis and design schema are addressed to properly locate well known layer elements and provide a general framework to design and develop communication protocols