This component is used to communicate with modems in command and data modes. It abstracts the UART I/O processing into a DTE (data terminal equipment) entity which is configured and setup separately. On top of the DTE, the command and data processing is performed in a DCE (data communication equipment) unit.

   +-----+   
   | DTE |--+
   +-----+  |   +-------+
            +-->|       |
   +-----+      |       |
   | DTE |----->| modem |---> modem events
   +-----+      |       |
             +->|       |
   +------+  |  +-------+ 
   | PPP  |--+   |   |
   | netif|-----------------> network events
   +------+      |   |
                 |   |
    start-ppp----+   |
    stop-ppp---------+

Start-up sequence

To initialize the modem we typically:

create DTE with desired UART parameters
create DCE with desired command palette
create PPP netif with desired network parameters
attach the DTE, DCE and PPP together to start the esp-modem
configure event handlers for the modem and the netif

Then we can start and stop PPP mode using esp-modem API, receive events from the ESP_MODEM base, as well as from netif (IP events).

DTE

Responsibilities of the DTE unit are

sending/receiving commands to/from UART
sending/receiving data to/from UART
changing data/command mode on physical layer

DCE

Responsibilities of the DCE unit are

definition of available commands
cooperate with DTE on changing data/command mode

DCE configuration

DCE unit configuration structure contains:

device -- sets up predefined commands for this specific modem device
pdp context -- used to setup cellular network
populate command list -- uses runtime configurable linked list of commands. New commands could be added and/or existing commands could be modified. This might be useful for some applications, which have to (re)define and execute multiple AT commands. For other applications, which typically just connect to network, this option might be preferably turned off (as the consumes certain amount of data memory)

PPP-netif

The modem-netif attaches the network interface (which was created outside of esp-modem) to the DTE and serves as a glue layer between esp-netif and esp-modem.

Additional units

ESP-MODEM provides also provides a helper module to define a custom retry/reset strategy using:

a very simple GPIO pulse generator, which could be typically used to reset or power up/down the module
a command executor abstraction, that helps with retrying sending commands in case of a failure or a timeout and run user defined recovery actions.

Modification of existing DCE

In order to support an arbitrary modem, device or introduce a new command we typically have to either modify the DCE, adding a new or altering an existing command or creating a new "subclass" of the existing DCE variants.