A Survey of Light-Weight Transport Protocols for High-Speed Networks

Abstract

Made possible by progress in fiber-optic and VLSI technologies, networks offering increasing transmission capacity at decreasing error rates are becoming available. New applications would benefit from this bandwidth but software protocol processing rates have not kept up with available raw transmission speed. We present a comparative survey of techniques used at the transport layer in eight representative protocols, most of which were designed to improve the protocol processing rate. The protocols are the relevant portions of the APPN, Datakit, Delta-t, NETBLT, OSI/TP4, TCP, VMTP, and XTP architectures. We then go on to discuss which of those techniques seem the most promising to us. An extensive list of references is included. © 1990 IEEE