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I’ve been preparing for my talk at the local IEEE Communications Society meeting. The challange for me is to make this talk accessible to the multi-disciplined group of engineers that attend these meetings. One of the subjects of my talk concerns design patterns so I’m trying to come up with a definition that everyone at the meeting will understand. Here’s my first stab at it:

A design pattern is a reusable concept for combining software components or objects to implement a function. It’s like the software equivalent of a phase locked loop in hardware. The implementation of the individual components can vary widely but the function and interconnection of the components remains the same.

I figure that anyone involved in electronic communications will know what a phase-locked-loop is and hopefully the software engineers in the group will know what design patterns are.

Well, they’re letting me escape the cubicle again to give another talk on using C++ for networking protocol software. Basically my talk is another “Why C++ is good for you.” or really, more like “A little abstraction doesn’t have to hurt (performance).”

The actual title is: Using C++ and Design Patterns in Communications Protocol Software. Design patterns and C++ provide better abstraction features than standard C. Unfortunately, these abstraction features are rarely used in high performance real time applications such as network protocol software because of the perception that their overhead and run time costs are too high. This talk examines the actual costs of using C++ and design patterns in networking protocol software and suggests some strategies for reducing run time costs and overhead.

The talk is on September 13 in Germantown, Maryand and is sponsered by the Washington, DC chapter of the IEEE Communications Society.