A communication architecture for high-speed networking

The horizontally oriented protocol structure (HOPS) is proposed. The horizontal structure, coupled with a small number of layers, eliminates unnecessary replication and processing of functions and lowers the unnecessary interprocess communication burden of the protocol execution-for example, unnecessary error detection for voice packets in integrated applications and unnecessary error detection in multiple layers for data applications are eliminated, the overhead associated with multi-peer-to-peer connection to multilayer architecture is substantially reduced, etc. The proposed architecture lends itself more naturally to full parallel implementation. Parallelism offers the potential of increased protocol processing rates, reduction in processing latency, and further reduction in processing overhead; and with the advances in VLSI, full parallel implementation becomes more and more feasible. The scheme also features selective functionality, which permits the protocol to easily adjust itself to the kind of performance demanded by the network-application requirements