Simple transport mechanism for distributed systems on internetwork

Abstract

Transport mechanism which is composed of transport and network layers in terms of Open Systems Interconnection model plays an important role for distributed systems, and it is required to support the interprocess communication service which is at the heart of distributed systems. Over reliable and fast network, more simple network protocol than current layered protocols may be sufficient for reliable network communication. This thesis presents Simple Transport Mechanism(STM) which is composed of Simple Internetwork Protocol(SIP) and Simple Transport Protocol(STP). It is a simple and efficient datagram transport mechanism for distributed systems on internetworks of local area networks and is based on Uniform Datagram Service Transport Protocol(UDSTP) which can support multiple-packet messages with semi-virtual circuit mechanism. By efficient packetizing mechanism at transport layer and by simple internetwork protocol, STM provides an efficient datagram service to interprocess communication interface compared with conventional layered protocol architectures. We implemented STM and evaluated the performances of several combinations of flow and error control mechanisms which comprise STM by simulation method. As a result, we can see that STM with blast flow control and Go-Back-N error control mechanism shows the best performance as the number of errors increases under the assumption that network load is light.