A secure high-speed transaction protocol
Sape J. Mullender · Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands · 1984
Most computer networks use a byte stream protocol for communication between processes, which suffer from two important drawbacks: the addressing mechanisms provided are often process-dependent or location-dependent, and communication is slow.While carrying out research into distributed operating systems at the Vrije Universiteit and the Centre for Mathematics & Computer Science, we have developed a transaction-oriented transport protocol for the Amoeba distributed operating system [Tanenbaum81 a], aimed for high-speed, with an addressing mechanism that is not only more general, but provides a protection mechanism as well.The basic mechanism for communication between processes is the transaction: a client process sends a request to a server process, which carries out the request and returns a reply.Protection is provided by using ports, chosen from a sparse address space, for addressing services.These ports serve as a "capability" for communication with the service.Through its simplicity, the transaction protocol achieves much higher transmission rates than other protocols executing on similar hardware (about 300 Kbytes I sec process-to-process).The protection mechanism will be described, and the mechanisms for realising high transmission speeds.