A Language-Based Approach to Protocol Construction

The increasing availability of high-speed LANs is fueling interest in user-level network architectures. Such architectures provide applications with direct access to the network interface, thereby allowing network protocols to be moved to user-level and specialized for various applications. As a result, the construction of efficient yet flexible network protocols that have been tailored for specific application domains has become a new challenge. Flexibility is typically addressed by protocol layering techniques such as those available in the x-kernel, but layering often adds to message passing overheads. This thesis presents a language-based framework for quickly and easily constructing correct and modular protocols without sacrificing performance. The framework has been used to implement multiple protocols (e.g., Horus and Active Messages) that have been subjected to formal validation techniques to detect errors in the protocol logic and then compiled to efficient executable code that shows performance better than or comparable to corresponding hand-optimized versions in C.