Seriald Overview

Seriald makes use of a layered communications architecture, as can be seen in Figure 1 below. In this arrangement, data to be sent over the wire enters via the top of the stack, and works its way down. Each layer processes the data, possibly adding, removing, or modifying bytes, and passes the data down to the next layer. The bottom most layer is connected to the communications hardware itself.

Each individual layer operates independently from the others; the layered design allows individual layers to be added, removed, reordered, or modified without requiring changes outside of the code for an individual layer.

The layer stack shown in the figure above is typical; however, it is not uncommon to encounter situations in which certain layers (such as the Reed-Solomon FEC layer) would be missing, or additional layers (i.e., for channel access) would be added. But the stack shown is the most common setup. This document describes the over-the-air format for version 1 of Seriald.