The inefficient presentation conversion code is a major difficulty for using a distributed-applications development environment (such as a CORBA-, Java-RMI-, DCE-, or ASN.1-based environment) to build high-speed network applications. The stub compilers included in these environments generate code that is either very slow or has a large code size. This paper presents a technique for automatically generating compact and efficient presentation conversion code. This is achieved by using a hybrid of two implementation alternatives for presentation conversion routines (interpreted and procedure-driven code). The optimization is modeled as a knapsack problem. A Markov model is used in combination with heuristic branch prediction rules for estimating execution frequencies. An optimization stage based on these ideas was implemented in the ASN.1 compiler Mavros. Experimental evaluation of this implementation shows that investing only 25% of the code size of fully optimized code results in a performance improvement of 55%-68%.

A prototype profiling method (formalized profile description and protocol configuration tool) for tailoring standard protocol options to the specific needs of an application is described. It is applicable to any protocol specified in ASN.1. The profiling of OSI application layer standards is used as a proof of concept. By applying the method to formalize the US government profiles, the author was able to reduce the source code size of major parts of common OSI applications by 30 to 50%.>