The design and implementation of a high-speed user-space transport protocol

Audio and video are fast becoming an integral part of new computing environments. These media have transport requirements which differ from the normal bursty computer traffic. There is therefore a need to explore transport protocols that can provide different qualities of service. User-space implementations of such protocols are particularly interesting because they can be easily tested and refined. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a high-speed user-space protocol called A1. Its preliminary performance in an ATM environment is presented and compared with an efficient kernel implementation of TCP/IP