A survey of communication processor systems

In this paper, various Communication Processor Systems (CPS) architectures are reviewed and classified according to their interconnection organizations. The evolution and future development of the CPS architectures are discussed and the intercommunication subsystem requirement, interconnection networks structure, network hardware and software design aspects are carefully examined. The functional baseline for the processing unit of the CPS is identified and a comparative study of various existing and proposed processing units is included. The critical review is based on the important features such as the reliability improvement, the interrupt handling, the priority encoding, and the optimized repertoire, etc. Finally, general software considerations are also outlined.