In the next weeks I’ll try to describe the steps taken in order to decompose ASTERIX, Eurocontrol variable length binary protocol for Radar message Exchange. According to Eurocontrol, ASTERIX Stands for: All Purpose STructured Eurocontrol SuRveillance Information EXchange. Try not to confuse it with Asterisk (the opensource telephony project).
One of the major challenges was to achieve a great reuse of the domain classes designed to mirror the protocol fields since ASTERIX employs a design where some packet types are simply extensions of previous released versions, therefore sharing a huge amount of fields. One example is the Cat034 and Cat002 packets. If you are unfamiliar with ASTERIX, Eurocontrol site has a great deal of documentation on ASTERIX format.
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