Dynamic Protocol Stack Composition: Protocol Independent Addressing

This paper presents a generic addressing framework (GAF) which enables the development of protocol stack independent applications. This framework has been developed in the context of dynamic protocol stack composition [8]. Having a way to compose [8][7] and build [3] protocol stacks is not sufficient. The protocol layers a stack is composed of have an impact on the addressing used inside the stack. Since addresses are used by applications, the impact of modifying the stack dynamically is not automatically transparent. The addressing framework we present in this paper provides a generalised view on network communication to solve this addressing problem. We validated the GAF in a proof-of-concept prototype.