Because the details of how the network is accessed varies widely between platforms, we need to abstract the network calls to Tierra functions that conditionally compile. For example, the sendto() socket call should be replaced with something like Tsendto(). Tsendto() would contain the #ifdefs necessary for it to compile to the relevant functions on each platform. It was also agreed that the part of Tierra that checks for incoming messages should be split off as a separate process in order to speed up the Tierra process itself.