A TCP/IP transport layer for the DAQ of the CMS experiment

The CMS collaboration is currently investigating various networking technologies that may meet the requirements of the CMS Data Acquisition System (DAQ). During this study, a peer transport component based on TCP/IP has been developed using object-oriented techniques for the distributed DAQ framework named XDAQ This framework has been designed to facilitate the development of distributed data acquisition systems within the CMS Experiment. The peer transport component has to meet 3 main requirements. Firstly, it had to provide fair access to the communication medium for competing applications. Secondly, it had to provide as much of the available bandwidth to the application layer as possible. Finally, it had to hide the complexity of using non-blocking TCP/IP connections from the application layer. This paper describes the development of the peer transport component and then presents and draws conclusions on the measurements made during tests. The major topics investigated include: blocking versus non-blocking communication, TCP/IP configuration options, multi-rail connections. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.