A rapid increase in the transmission bandwidth of optical networks has
created a bottleneck in protocol processing at the host systems. This
paper presents a high-performance transport protocol, HTPNET, that is
designed to exploit the evolving characteristics of high-speed networ
ks. Importantly, the highly parallel architecture of HTPNET provides a
suitable platform for the parallel implementation of presentation pro
cessing, which incurs high computation overheads. A parallel architect
ure based on the T9000 transputer and C104 router technology has been
designed to support high-speed protocol processing. A simulation of th
e architecture has been implemented and has demonstrated the advantage
of exploiting a parallel architecture for protocol processing.