Using Transport Services instead of specific Transport Protocols

For most applications the used transport service providers are predetermined during the development of the application. This makes it difficult to consider the application communication requirements and to exploit specific features of the network technology. Specialized protocols that are more efficient and offer a qualitative improved service are typically not supported by most applications because they are not commonly available. In this paper we propose a concept for the realization of protocol independent transport services. Only a transport service is predetermined during the development of the application and an appropriate transport service provider is dynamically selected at run time. This enables to exploit specialized protocols if possible, but standard protocols could still be used if necessary. The main focus of this paper is how a transport service could provide a new transport service provider transparently to existing applications. A prototype is presented that maps TCP/IP based applications to an ATM specific transport service provider which offers a reliable and unreliable transport service like TCP/IP.