[Manet-dt] Generalised OLSR packet/message format comments

Justin, Thomas, Chris, et al

I am wrestling with the fact that certain <msg-semantics> settings 
(e.g. bit 0 not set, but bit 1 set) results in non-32-bit aligned 
<msg-header-info> content ...

This by itself wouldn't be an issue, if there were some option to pad 
the <msg-header-info> to 32-bit alignment ...

Perhaps another unused <msg-semantic> bit could be set to indicate 
whether the <msg-header-info> is padded out to 32-bit alignment, 
regardless of the semantics? (i.e. a "tail" indicator?)

Perhaps I am too hung up on having 32-bit aligned message parsing 
code (i.e. so that TLV's and address blocks end up on 32-bit 
boundaries), but perhaps it would be useful for the <msg-header-info> 
to have a "tail" option like the address blocks do if that is desired 
for a protocol using this message construction?

I am creating a generalized set of C++ classes that implement message 
building and parsing that I will be using for an SMF "hello protocol" 
implementation.  I will be posting this code as part of the open 
source "nrlsmf" code distribution as it is more complete for anyone 
interested.  My current approach with the building/parsing code is to 
provide for 32-bit aligned packet/message construction.  In the 
longer term, I may provide an alternative implementation that doesn't 
require 32-bit alignment of significant packet/message structures 
(e.g. headers, address blocks, tlv blocks, etc), but I thought I 
would go for the "pretty" approach and thus the issue above came to 
light ...

Any comments?

cheers,

-- 
Brian
__________________________________
Brian Adamson
<mailto:adamson@itd.nrl.navy.mil>

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