An evaluation of priority consistency in protocol architectures

Workstations for digital audio and video applications must support predictable processing, presentation, and transmission of continuous media data while making efficient use of limited hardware resources. The authors present techniques for managing network resources and processing messages in a predictable fashion. Their solutions use a novel structure for the protocol processing software, and they examine several alternatives and discuss the engineering tradeoffs associated with each. Using simulation, they evaluate their protocol processing structures and show that the more sophisticated structures can improve the response time and predictability of time-constrained messages. The ideas presented in this paper can be applied to resource management in the operating system and to the structuring of application-level servers. The designers of gateway machines (for internetwork routing) which handle both time-constrained traffic and non-time-constrained traffic may also benefit from this study