Performance of generative programming based protocol implementation

Protocol Implementation Framework for Linux (PIX) is a protocol development tool using generative programming. It aims at capturing the similarities in behaviors among different layers of protocols and grouping solutions to cross-cutting concerns of communication systems. It achieves a high degree of configurability by providing several combinations which could be chosen to generate desired protocols. This paper addresses the following open question. How does the performance of generative programming based protocol implementation compare with traditional protocol implementation techniques? This paper provides an answer to this question. A benchmark is developed to give a thorough performance analysis of PIX to contrast it with other protocol development frameworks. The benchmark compares the performance of bulk data transfer. The file transfer protocol (FTP) is used for comparison purposes. Latency, throughput and resource usage measurements are provided in order to compare the performance of FIX and generative programming with NcFTP, which uses structured programming, and x-Kernel, which uses structured and object-based programming