Dynamic protocol stacks

Many people around the globe enjoy the amenities of a ubiquitously available communication infrastructure in which many diverse applications co-exist. Each of these applications impose different communication requirements on the infrastructure, such as the required level of security, transmission reliability or real time data delivery. However, all those applications run over the same network architecture, the Internet architecture. Currently, many add-ons to the original architecture make this possible. However, it is questionable whether this add-on approach is scalable an can accommodate future applications. Therefore, many researchers develop new network architectures from scratch, so called clean slate architectures, that are designed to be more appropriate for future challenges. In this dissertation we have developed such a clean slate network architecture called Dynamic Protocol Stack (DPS) architecture. The DPS architecture tackles the challenge of providing a future-oriented architecture by introducing flexibility at two levels. First, newly developed communication protocols can be included seamlessly in the architecture and second, the protocol stack used for the communication can be adapted to the current environment and communication needs while transferring data. We provide two different implementations of the DPS architecture. The first implementation on a general-purpose CPU offers the same packet processing performance for DPS-packets as well as for Internet-packets. The second implementation, called EmbedNet, uses an FPGA-based system-on-chip platform and allows for the dynamic run-time mapping of network functionality to either software or hardware. Thus it offers hardware acceleration for arbitrary network functionality in the DPS architecture.