Transport System Architectures for High-Performance Communications Subsystems
Douglas C. Schmidt, Tatsuya Suda · 1998
Providing end-to-end gigabit communication support for bandwidth-intensive distributed applications requires highperformance transport systems. This paper describes and classifies transport system mechanisms that integrate operating system resources (such as CPU(s), virtual memory, and network adapters) together with communication protocols (such as TCP/IP and XTP) to support applications running on local and wide area networks. A taxonomy is presented that compares and evaluates four widely available transport systems in terms of their support for protocol processing. The systems covered in this paper include System V UNIX STREAMS, the BSD UNIX networking subsystem, the x-kernel, and the Conduit framework from the Choices operating system. This paper is intended to help researchers navigate through the transport system design space by describing alternative mechanisms for developing transport systems. 1 Introduction The demand for many types of distributed applications is expanding r...