Flexible Active–Passive and Push–Pull Protocols

By means of a simple buffer design, we show that active versus passive and push versus pull settings in asynchronous communication protocols, also known as handshake protocols, can be controlled by initialization. We advocate postponing initialization until run time and show that postponement simplifies the design and design process and serves test, debug, and analysis. We design the buffer as a network of communication channels with storage, called Links , and storage-free computation modules, called Joints . We describe the behaviors of Links and Joints using a shared variable model presented here for the first time.