Description of a Highly-Flexible High-Speed Transport Protocol

As new technologies in transmission and switching systems emerge, high speed networks and applications are being developed, and deployed. Several research institutions are designing and building networks to supply data rates on the order of gigabits per second to each network interface. As these networks develop, high speed applications requiring this large bandwidth are also appearing. However, these applications often demand performance bounds on metrics other than bandwidth. For example, error rates, absolute latency, and interpacket delay jitter, are also critical performance parameters for some high speed applications. As the availability of high speed networks increases, the performance bottlenecks have moved from the physical networks to the communication software and protocols. This paper presents a transport layer protocol designed to meet the wide-ranging needs of high-speed applications.