I'm writing code to implement an existing communication protocol that uses a packet with a fixed header and variable payload (depending on a header field). I started using a previously recorded file and fstream::read() calls; i.e. read(buf,1) looking for the start-of-packet, read(buf, HEADER_LEN), extract the payload size and read the remainder. I am now looking to hook up the receiver logic to the actual gear and need to handle timeouts and such. I'm new to asio but it looks like what I may need given that I have to support device connections via serial ports and sockets but I also need to retain the ability to read from files. I'm wondering if anyone could suggest an approach to support all three comm schemes with the same packet reception logic. The idea would be for the receive routine to return message pointers or throw on timeouts or partial packets Paul