Parallel Protocol Implementations an Transputers - Experiences with OSI TP4, OSI CLNP, and XTP

The demand for high performance communication subsystems has rapidly increased during the last few years. Emerging applications (e.g., multi-media applications) requiring high performance are one of the driving factors for this development. But still there is a performance gap of at least one order of magnitude between the bandwidth available on the network and the application requirements. This is based on the insufficient processing power inside communication nodes. They cannot serve networks with data rates in the range of Mbps to Gbps. To overcome this so-called transport bottleneck high performance architectures for communication subsystems have to be designed considering hardware and software structure as well as protocol design and service requirements. This paper presents an approach towards high performance communication platforms based on parallel protocol implementations on transputer networks. Thereby standard OSI protocols (TP4 and CLNP) as well as emerging lightweight protocols, such as XTP have been explored. The TP4 implementation is here presented more in detail and some experiences gained within this project are summarized.