Huawei Huawei Huawei In the Cloud computing era, lots of protocols are proposed to meet the various requirements requested by the quickly emerging Cloud applications. However, protocols used to be independently developed by closed communities. Each protocol proposes its own specifications and encoding method. Some common functions are repeatedly developed by different protocols. The way that the protocols used to be developed significantly prolongs the process that protocols are brought to the real market. In order to address these problems, this document proposes GEARS (Generic and Extensible Architecture for pRotocolS) which provides an open platform to facilitate protocol innovations. A new protocol would be developed as an application running on this platform while those common functions provided by this platform can be reused. Customized features of this application can be easily built as add- ons with the friendly and extensible data modeling language.