PARTIAL ORDER CONNECTIONS - A NEW CONCEPT FOR HIGH-SPEED AND MULTIMEDIA SERVICES AND PROTOCOLS

This paper presents a new concept that has been developed to define hi gh performance multimedia data transfers between communicating entitie s. All current protocols use either connectionless (CL) or connection- oriented (CO) approaches and many mechanisms have been proposed in eac h case. Both sets of present CL and CO protocols are not conceptually related and there is a design gap between the definition and use of th ese two families. A new concept, a partial order connection (POC), is defined here. It will be seen that CL and CO approaches are two specif ic cases of the much more general concept presented here. More precise ly, a POC is an end-to-end connection that provides a partial order se rvice where the objects can be delivered to the users in a different o rder from the transmitted order It is first shown how this new concept has emerged and what are its interests in terms of resources. Then a formal definition of reliable and unreliable POCS and a way to measure their complexity will be given. It is shown how such a generalized co nnection can be used and how time constraints can be handled in an int egrated way, leading to the definition of a design space for protocols .