Abstract

The range of possible communication technologies on which applications may run has widened considerably in the last few years. Bandwidth now varies from thousands of bits per second to hundreds of millions, with the possible geographical span of a network ranging from a single office to intercontinental. The reliability of these networks has also increased due both to the media being used and link level error detection and correction being employed. There is also an increasingly wide range of applications that require communication support. These range from low bandwidth, latency insensitive, such as electronic mail, to high bandwidth, latency sensitive, such as video conferencing. Current protocol stacks are inadequate for the diverse range of these emerging applications and networks. Being generic they are not adaptable to a specific application-network configuration and provide "all or nothing" application access to the protocol. This leads to inefficiencies, as parts of the protoc...

Citations