Find Properties of Horus Stacks

See also Validating the Horus Protocols

The tool below allows you to build Horus stacks and see interactively what kind of communications properties they will give you.

In ``Add/delete'' mode, click on a ``network'' button (lower right-hand side of the applet) to define or redefine which network you'll be working over. Click on the ``layers'' buttons at the right to drop new layers on top of the stack. Click on layers in the stack to delete them. Look on the left side to see what kind of properties the designer of a user application over this stack might want to provide, and the properties that the protocol stack will provide when the application provides the checked-off properties. (If you see checkboxes, you can click on them to experiment with providing or not providing the requested properties.)

In ``Document'' mode, clicking on the name of a layer or property will produce a window describing the layer or property.

Try stacking the SIGN and NAK layers on top of UDP. Notice that it makes a big difference in which order the layers are stacked. Notice that CHKSUM and NAK over UDP is not very good (because the stack is subject to attacks by an intruder), but if you replace UDP with a physically secure network (called Secure in this demo) you do better.

Notice that you can remove the MaxSend application requirement by adding the appropriate-sized FRAG layer on top of NAK. This is the usual approach. A less usual approach is to put FRAG directly over the network, and layer SIGN (or CHKSUM, depending on the security of your network) and NAK on top of that. Try it.

(The interactive Horus stack property-finder should appear in this space. You must not have the ability to run Java applets. Too bad!)