A parallel implementation of XTP on transputers

Abstract

High performance communication systems have to provide very high data rates of more than 100 Mbit/s to new applications such as multimedia applications. To overcome the bottleneck in communication systems, the protocol processing of the layers above media access control layer, light weight protocols such as XTP (Xpress Transfer Protocol) are used. XTP is a protocol with functionality of layers 3 and 4 and was designed for protocol processing in reliable high speed networks such as FDDI. XTP is based on parallel finite state machines (FSMs) to support an efficient realization in VLSI. This paper presents a software implementation of XTP for a multiprocessor system. The implementation is based on these FSMs, which are mapped onto processes running on the processors of a multiprocessor architecture and communicating with each other by message passing.