4.2 Summary

Protocols in a system may be standards based or proprietary. They may be stateful or stateless. Stateful protocols are realized using state machines, which may be implemented via switch–case constructs or state event tables. More than one state machine may be present in a protocol implementation.

PDUs are preprocessed and provided as inputs to the state machine. Protocol interfaces can include drivers, buffers, timers, and events along with various forms of IPC. Protocol management includes configuration and control of its management parameters, including saving and restoring of configuration. Upon initialization, protocols will need to use settable sizing variables to avoid recompilation.