DATA LINK CONTROL EMULATION - RAPID PROTOTYPING FOR HIGH-SPEED NETWORKS

Data Link Control (DLC) emulation is an efficient and effective method ology for rapid-prototyping of high-speed network technologies. In a h igh-speed network attachment, DIC emulation replaces the original prot ocol stack with one that has two DIC protocols and performs all the ne cessary conversions between them. The lower portion of the protocol st ack implements the prototyped network, while the upper portion impleme nts the original high-speed network stack. This allows application, to lake advantage of the improved characteristics of emerging network te chnologies without restructuring, rewriting, or making any investment in application, protocol, or system software that interfaces to the or iginal high-speed network adopter. In this fashion, evaluation of new technologies is Feasible in real environments at a low cost. We show t hat DLC emulation is a flexible and general technique that supports a wide range of Data Link Control protocols, and we demonstrate its effe ctiveness through a case study, where an FDDI adapter is used to provi de SMDS connectivity over T1 and T3 links. We show that DLC emulation achieves high performance at a significantly low development cost for an attachment to a new network technology, because frame conversion be tween DLC protocols can be implemented efficiently ''on-the-fly'' usin g rapid-prototyping hardware techniques.