Alternative high-performance architectures for communication protocols

The traditional communication protocol architectures have a number of components that present bottlenecks to achieving high performance. These bottlenecks include the way the protocols are designed and the way protocol stacks are structured and implemented. With the advent of high speed networks, the future communication environment is expected to comprise of a variety of networks with widely varying characteristics. The next generation multimedia applications require transfer of a wide variety of data such as voice, video, graphics, and text and have widely varying access patterns such as interactive, bulk transfer, and real-time guarantees. Traditional protocol architectures have difficulty in supporting multimedia applications and high-speed networks because they are neither designed nor implemented for such a diverse communication environment. This thesis analyzes the drawbacks of traditional protocol architectures and proposes alternative high-performance architectures for multimedia applications and high-speed network environments. Three protocol architectures are proposed: Direct Application Association, Integrated Layered Logical Multiplexing, and Non-Monolithic Protocol Architectures. To demonstrate the viability of these architectures, a protocol independent framework for each proposed protocol architecture is implemented in the context of a parallelized version of the z-kernel. Implementation of the TCP/UDP-IP-Ethernet protocol stack for each of the proposed architectures demonstrates that the performance of these protocol architectures is comparable to that of a traditional protocol architecture. In addition, the proposed architectures are more scalable on multiprocessor systems than the traditional protocol architecture and enable some of the key requirements (Application specific Quality of Service, Application Level Framing) and optimizations (such as n Integrated Layer Processing) necessary for the future communication environment.Science, Faculty ofComputer Science, Department ofGraduat