A Concept for a Flexible High Performance Transport System

Transport systems as they are known today will not be suited for the environment of high speed networks and future applications as e.g. multi-media applications. First of all, concepts to overcome the protocol processing bottleneck are necessary. They lead to a design of a transport oriented component within a network as a conglomeration of protocol functions without internal layering. This results in an impressive reduction of functions to be realized. Moreover, the transport service interface must be designed in a way that allows an easy and efficient support of various service requirements. Therefore, the transport service interface can be classified into four transport service classes, which are derived from the application requirements on performance and functional criteria. Each service class is associated with an individual protocol stack. The paper discusses these topics with special regards to flexible high speed transport systems. The flexibility, which is the possibility to adapt the transport system to the specific application dynamically, will be obtained by using an underlying multi-processor architecture, where the processing of different functions in parallel will be supported.