Research And Implementation Of Universal ASN.1 Application Model

ASN.1 provides a lot of data types, flexible extension mechanisms, efficient encoding and decoding rules. It is the primary approach for protocol description in telecom, multimedia communications, data encryption and other fields, applicable to describe complex protocols. However, a number of industrial applications indicate that there exist many limitations when ASN.1 is applied in large-scale distributed systems, one of which is the cost of develop and maintenance increases greatly with quantity of code grows.In the universal ASN.1 application model, PDU parameter container can substitute for source codes produced by the ASN.1 compiler hence system's code lines can be reduced greatly. Since applications no longer need to produce code by compiling ASN.1 syntax files, developers won't need to buy or develop an ASN.1 compiler. As XML is independent of operating systems and programming languages, we use it to describe the structure of PDU and so heterogeneous systems can share one copy of XML descriptions. At the end of this paper, a simple example is presented to show how to use the universal application model and analyze the result.