Towards Tailoring Protocols to Application Specific Requirements

A distributed application that uses a standard protocol for communication very often applies only a subset of the protocol options provided by the standard. However, it is difficult today for an application developer to tailor standard protocol options to the specific needs of an application, because no appropriate profiling method (formalized profile description and protocol configuration tool) exists. In this paper, we describe a prototype of such a method that is applicable to any protocol specified in ASN.1. We use the profiling of OSI application layer standards as a proof of concept. By applying our method to formalize the U.S. government profiles we were able to reduce the source code size of major parts of common OSI applications by 30 to 50%.