A reactive implementation of the Tau protocol composition mechanism

Tau is a framework for end-to-end communication services. Tau supports the nonlayered composition of protocol functions. A key part of the Tau framework is a generic protocol interface, which hides from protocol functions the details of other protocol functions with which they are composed. Structuring this generic protocol interface is an interesting and challenging design question. The paper presents an overview of the design goals and pieces of the Tau framework, and argues that a reactive programming model offers advantages for both reasoning about and implementing the generic protocol interface. The authors also describe their experience in composing protocol functions using a reactive model to implement the NETBLT bulk-data transfer protocol.