A real-time IPC service over ATM networks for the Chorus distributed system

Describes a real-time interprocess communication (RT-IPC) service that is suitable for distributed systems built over ATM networks. This location-transparent communication service offers end-to-end quality of service (QoS) guarantees and end-to-end priority propagation. It relies on a specific real-time ATM adaptation layer (AAL-RT) that allows the transmission of a low-priority message to be pre-empted by a higher-priority one, and on a transport service which is in charge of QoS negotiation, the setting up of the ATM virtual channel and priority inheritance. The RT-IPC service is implemented in the Chorus distributed operating system as servers running in the micro-kernel address space. It is used for real-time communication within ANTARA real-time clusters, and allows communication at a user rate of up to 130 Mbps over 155-Mbps ATM links. The end-to-end transfer delay between participants is less than 400 /spl mu/s.