Protocol Parallelization

There is increasing concern about the capability of existing protocols to keep pace with communication rates, as rates approach the gigabit range. This assumes a sort of “protocol bottleneck.” Many similar bottlenecks are alleviated by the use of parallelism, so one hypothesis is to “parallelize” protocols. We examine the pros and cons of this hypothesis, and the dimensions to which parallelism might be applied. We distinguish the unique communication issues that result. Our conclusions indicate that conventional parallelism may not be applicable to protocols. New types of parallelism become more significant in this light. These include information parallelism (Parallel Communication) and packet-train parallelism. Keyword Codes: C.2.2, C.2.4, C.5.0