A key problem in high speed networking will be making sure that the end system protocol processing can keep pace with the high bandwidth of the network. This paper focuses on how some common and very time-consuming protocol functions can be implemented more efficiently. The functions are; data encoding/decoding, checksum calculation and data encryption/decryption. Instead of evaluating each of the functions separately in their respective layer, the computations are postponed until all of them can be done in sequence of reads and writes to memory.
An experiment with this implementation technique is ongoing. We report on some preliminary results on consequences for protocols and on performance.
Proceedings of the 2nd MultiG Workshop, Stockholm, June 1991. (Not available electronically)