Special or General Purpose End-to-End Transport Mechanisms in Distributed Systems: One View.
R. Watson, Sandra A. Mamrak · International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems · 1984
There is increasing interest in the design of special-purpose end-to-end transport mechanisms for use in distributed systems. This work is motivated by the perceived high delay, CPU, and other costs of many general-purpose transport protocol designs and implementations. The special-purpose designs try to minimize the mechanisms needed to match the error and other service properties of specific networks with the services required by application and communication interface semantics. The paper argues that general-purpose transport protocol designs and implementations can be effective in a wide range of distributed applications because: (1) many of the mechanisms and implementation techniques used in the special-purpose work apply to general-purpose transport protocol designs and implementations; (2) special-purpose designs have hidden costs; and (3) quite special overall system loads, application response times, and interaction patterns are required before general-purpose protocols are the main performance bottlenecks.