Unified Development and Deployment of Network Protocols

In this paper we describe GEA– an interface that enables the development of event-driven network protocols, their testing in a simulated network and deployment using a single, unmodified code. Normally testing and deployment requires separated implementations which results in a significant development and maintenance overhead. This is due to the different APIs of the underlying systems. As a solution to this problem we propose a common, generic event based interface called GEA. We present its design principles and show by example how to implement a network protocols with it. Finally we compare the execution of the protocol implementation in both environments to show the effectiveness of our approach.