A multi-platform programming interface for protocol development

We present a programming interface, called PICA, which aims to reduce the production cycle duration for communication protocols. It offers a user-friendly API that is very intuitive and that covers the major necessities which these protocols may have. Since most research is done in the Linux operating system, it also aims to reduce very significantly the time required to port a protocol implementation to other platforms like Windows NT or Windows CE by providing source code compatibility. We estimated the efficiency of our library and found that the overhead introduced is very small.