C++ Chain of Responsibility Pattern: Network Events
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The networking problem hasn’t been solved yet—not even nearly! Networks are populated with users who are increasingly hungry for bandwidth and computational resources. I should know—I’m one of them! Just the other day, I downloaded about 200MB of software in an hour of usage on a Wi-Fi network. So, that’s a total of roughly 200 * 8 * 1024 * 1024 bits in 3600 seconds, or a bandwidth requirement of 0.466Mbps. This download rate was probably limited more by the Web sites concerned than the local network, which boasted a link speed of 11Mbps.
Not surprisingly, networks are busy these days! With high levels of traffic and bursty usage patterns, networks often emit warning messages to management software. Large national networks typically emit gigabytes of such messages on a daily basis. Should the management software provide one big handler for all such messages, or is it better to allow messages to intelligently seek out an appropriate handler? Both approaches have their merits, al though the former is more common. The chain of responsibility pattern provides a model for the latter.
The Takeaway
This article shows you some important (and hopefully interesting!) aspects of modern network operations. In this context, you’ll also see how to define classes that use the chain of responsibility pattern. A sneak preview of the finished code is illustrated in Listing 1, in which three related entities make up the chain of responsibility.
Listing 1 Implementation of the Chain of Responsibility
Connection* connection = new Connection(No_Event_Support);
Lsp* lsp = new Lsp("LSP123", connection, LINK_1_BROKEN);
Path* path = new Path(lsp, No_Event_Support);
path->HandleEvent();
The last line in Listing 1 simulates a message being sent to the lowest level in the chain (more on this later). As usual, if you like you can download the full program source (one C++ file and one header file), build it and try it out for yourself. Let’s now get the background information out of the way!