A Uniform Approach to Configuration and Communication in Distributed Systems

This paper describes the design and implementation of extensions to the Regis distributed programming platform which add protocol stacks to communication endpoints. Although our initial goal was to extend Regis to support multiple transport protocols, groupcast and multimedia communication, the dynamic nature of the protocol framework allowed new approaches to the design of communication protocol software. The paper describes this approach through examples and shows how it leads to greater effiency and a greater degree of code reuse. 1. Introductio