Compensating for moderate effective throughput at the desktop

This article presents the design and development of a networking system architecture targeted to support high-speed TCP/IP communication over ATM. The discussed architecture has been developed in the form of an integrated system which incorporates state-of-the-art software and hardware subsystems, and an OC-12c ATM adapter (622 Mb/s). Moreover, the design of this embedded system has been based on the Chorus real-time operating system, which, in turn, hosts an accelerated TCP/IP protocol stack over ATM. Furthermore, the embedded system board has been developed according to the PCI specification to easily be plugged into a host platform. In addition, the OC-12c ATM adapter subsystem has been designed and developed in order to also be plugged into the same host. The developed architecture has proven very efficient and reliable, providing high-throughput and low-latency bulk data communications. The measured performance on an OC-3c-based (155 Mb/s) testbed has shown that an optimally implemented TCP/IP stack, hosted by a real-time kernel and coupled with an ATM adapter, offers a robust desktop platform for high-speed end-to-end communications. The main feature of the accelerated TCP/IP protocol stack is the out-of-band processing of control and data information. The protocol accelerator embedded system processes the TCP/IP headers and accomplishes checksum computations, while data is transferred from the host's user memory space directly to the network. Finally, for validation purposes, the prototype system has been incorporated in an existing networking infrastructure targeted to support mass storage applications.