DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A HIGH-SPEED TRANSPORT PROTOCOL

We present the design, analysis, and implementation of an end-to-end transport protocol that is capable of high throughput consistent with the evolving high-speed physical networks based on fiber-optic transmission lines and high-capacity switches. Unlike current transport protocols in which changes in control/state information are exchanged between the two communicating entities only when some significant event occurs, this protocol exchanges relevant and full state information periodically and frequently. It is shown that this reduces the complexity of protocol processing by removing many of the procedures required to recover from network inadequacies, such as bit-errors, packet loss, and out of sequence packets, and makes it more amenable to parallel processing. Also, to increase channel utilization in the presence of high-speed, long latency networks, and to support diagrams, we incorporate an efficient implementation of the selective repeat method of error control in our protocol. We describe an implementation using a Motorola 68030-based multiprocessor as a front-end processor. The current implementation can comfortable handle 10-15 Kpackets/s, and with a slightly different architecture, we believe it can be extended to handle 20 Kpackets/s. The key ideas of this protocol have been incorporated in AT&T's submission for the B-ISDN adaptation layer protocol to the T1S1, a standards organization which represents the United States in the CCITT.