High performance presentation and transport mechanisms for integrated communication subsystems

Abstract

The performance enhancement of communication protocols is an essential step toward the building of high performance communication subsystems. Integrated Layer Processing (ILP) has been proposed as an engineering principle for the optimization of communication protocol implementations. However, the applicability of this principle to complete operational communication subsystems has not been yet addressed. This is in part due to the lack of high performance implementation of presentation and transport functions. In this paper, we show to what extent "ILP based" optimizations improve the performance of some data manipulation functions (e.g. presentation encoding or checksumming) independently. We present how some of these implementation optimization techniques were applied to the ASN.l encodings rules. We also analyze the impact of such optimization techniques according to the support hardware. A prototype implementation of the XTP protocol is also described. ILP based optimization applied to the checksum calculation algorithm show that an important performance enhancement can be achieved. These results should facilitate the support of ILP within an operational communication subsystem.