Axon Application-Oriented Lightweight Transport Protocol Design

James P.G. Sterbenz and Gurudatta M. Parulkar,
“Axon: Application-Oriented Lightweight Transport Protocol Design”,
Tenth International Conference on Computer Communication (ICCC'90),
ICCC, Narosa Publishing House, New Delhi, India, Nov. 1990, pp. 379–387.
[ PostScript | WUCS-89-14.ps ]

ABSTRACT

This paper describes teh design of the application-oriented lightweight transport protocol for object transfer (ALTP-OT) in the Axon host communication architecture for distributed applications. The Axon project is investigating an integrated design of host architecture, operating systems, and communication protocols to allow applications to utilise the high bandwidth provided by the next generation of communications networks. ALTP-OT provides the end-to-end transport of segment and message objects for interprocess communication (IPC) across a very high speed internetwork, supporting demanding applications such as scientific visualisation and imaging. ALTP-OT uses rate-based flow control on a connection oriented internetwork substrate, and simplified error control specifically designed for the transfer of objects directly between application memory spaces [zero-copy].

Keywords

High-bandwidth low-latency gigabit zero-copy host-network interface, very high-speed internet, VHSI, distributed virtual shared memory, DVSM, DSM, network virtual storage, Multics, NVS, application-oriented lightweight transport protocol, ALTP, distributed scientific visualisation

Outline

1. Introduction
2. The Axon Architecture
   1. IPC in the Axon architecture
   2. Network virtual storage
   3. Communication protocols
   4. Host–network interface architecture
3. ALTP-OT Design
   1. Transport protocol taxonomy
      • general purpose
      • functionally partitioned
      • application oriented
      • special purpose
   2. Packet structure and format
      • control packet format
      • data packet format
   3. Flow control
      • rate-based
   4. Error control
      • packet handling
        • duplicates: discarded
        • corrupted: discarded / selective retransmission
        • lost: selective retransmission
        • sequence by placement (order of arrival does not matter)
      • Packet retransmission options
        • Location: receiver
        • Granularity
          • PKT – packet
          • PGE – page
          • SEG – segment
          • GRP – segment group
        • Fetch policy
          • AR – anticipatory retransmission
          • DR – demand retransmission
        • Preemption
          • NPR – non-preemptive (queued)
          • PE – preemptive (head-of-line)
        • Packet retransmission strategies
   5. Error control
      • Connection management
        • join-ipc
        • respecify-rate
        • leave-ipc
      • Object receive
        • get-segment
        • acquire-segment
        • release-segment
        • get-page
        • release-page
        • get-copy
        • receive-message
        • get-stream
        • retransmit-packets
      • Object transmit
        • remote-execute
        • send-copy
        • send-stream
        • send-message
        • invalidate-segment
4. Related Work
5. Conclusions

• References
• Acknowledgments
  • Work performed while James P.G. Sterbenz on leave of absence from IBM Corp., Rochester MN.
  • This work supported in part by Bellcore, BNR, Itatel SIT NEC, Southwestern Bell, and NSF grant DCI-8600947

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©2003 James P.G. Sterbenz <jpgs@sterbenz.org>