On the parallel implementation of OSI protocol processing systems

In a heterogeneous computing environment, computers have to use a suitable transfer syntax to communicate with each other because of the differences in internal data representations. Transfer syntax conversions take over 90% of the total processing power needed in OSI protocol processing. Application specific architectures in a heterogeneous system may not be efficient in performing the protocol processing functions and worsen the problem. We propose to use a stand alone protocol processing system making use of multiple processors in a shared memory architecture to provide the needed processing power. The results indicated that by prefetching the packets into the local memory of the processors, a processing throughput of 56O Mbits/s is possible