A Reliable Control Protocol for High-Speed Packet Transmission

This paper describes a control protocol for high-speed transfers between transceivers in a data communication system. One particularly suitable application of current topical interest would be to control lines linking nodes in a local area packet-switching system. The protocol applies for fixed-length data packets which must ultimately be received at their destination in sequence. With these specifications, a set of rules which is easy to implement in practice is established. The result is a packet interlock method of numbering packet transmissions and jumping back to retransmit a series of packets under error conditions. Problems associated with multiple errors, dummy packets, initial synchronization and resynchronization are investigated and found to be readily overcome by the proposed protocol.