Case study: HTPNET: a high performance transport protocol

The quantum increase in transmission speed of optical fibre networks has created a bottleneck in the transport protocol processing at host systems. In this paper, we present a high performance transport protocol system, HTPNET, that is designed to overcome this protocol processing bottleneck. HTPNET is based on a highly parallel architecture and is designed to exploit the evolving characteristics of high-speed networks. HTPNET uses an out-of-band signalling system based upon transmitter-paced periodic exchanges of state information between end systems. This mechanism exhibits several attractive properties which have been demonstrated to perform efficiently in a simulated high-speed environment with high bandwidth-delay-product. A prototype implementation of HTPNET has been constructed from a network of T800 transputers. The results obtained from this implementation are presented: these demonstrate the advantages of exploiting a parallel architecture for protocol processing.