The DYCE Concept - Architecture & Implementation Strategies
Abstract This paper presents an approach to design a powerful and flexible controller architecture in order to support new applications across various heterogeneous networks. The approach allows a run-time configuration of the protocol modules. In contrast to existing systems, the developer has the choice to apply different implementation strategies to a module, changing in this way its encapsulation and execution behaviour. Thus, one and the same module can meet different configuration requirements depending on its implementation form as: a typed dynamic library procedure, a typed unmovable thread, a typed movable thread, or a composed protocol graph. The proposed environment is a light-weight framework, called DYCE-2, which represents an implementation of the Dynamic Configuration Entity (DYCE) [Hein93]. DYCE is the central part of our flexible protocol architecture. To build such a flexible and also high-performance system we have to find out and uncover protocol functionalities which can operate concurrently. To achieve results on protocol inherent functional parallelism we have done extensive simulation studies using a petri net based specification technique.