HTPNET - A HIGH-PERFORMANCE TRANSPORT PROTOCOL

The quantum increase in transmission speed of optical fibre networks h as created a bottleneck in the transport protocol processing at host s ystems. In this paper, we present a high performance transport protoco l system, HTPNET, that is designed to overcome this protocol processin g bottleneck. HTPNET is based on a highly parallel architecture and is designed to exploit the evolving characteristics of highspeed network s. HTPNET uses an out-of-band signalling system based upon transmitter -paced periodic exchanges of state information between end systems. Th is mechanism exhibits several attractive properties which have been de monstrated to perform efficiently in a simulated high-speed environmen t with high bandwidth-delay-product. A prototype implementation of HTP NET has been constructed from a network of T800 transputers. The resul ts obtained from this implementation are presented: these demonstrate the advantages of exploiting a parallel architecture for protocol proc essing.