AMASP (ASCII Master Slave Protocol): a Lightweight MODBUS Based Customizable Communication Protocol for General Applications

Abstract

In this paper, we describe AMASP, a proposal for an open standard communication protocol / model whose objective is providing a novel and lightweight solution to the problem of communication between small computers acting in particular on embedded systems, but not limited to them. The protocol establishes addresses for computers or peripherals, allowing them to send messages directly to these addresses. It is based on message interchanging, being the messages composed by ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text or binary streams, according to the user customization. AMASP is very customizable using four different packets to send the messages and manage a master / slave communication  model. The protocol is designed to work where a direct communication link is established or a bus architecture is available - by serial, USB connections, etc - and it supports to many error checking algorithms that can be used in unsafe links. Due to the focus on simplicity, low overhead and metadata, it is a connectionless protocol and does not support routing.