This paper provides a comprehensive overview of our Network Time Interface (NTI) M-Module, which facilitates high-accuracy time distribution in LAN-based distributed real-time systems. Built around our custom UTCSU VLSI chip, it hosts all the hardware support required for interval-based external clock synchronization: A high-resolution state-and rate-adjustable clock, local accuracy intervals, ...

SNP provides a high-level abstraction for secure end-toend network communications. It supports both stream and datagram semantics with security guarantees (e.g., data origin authenticity, data integrity and data confidentiality). It is designed to resemble the Berkeley sockets interface so that security can be easily retrofitted into existing socket programs with only minor modifications. SNP i...

General switch management protocol (GSMP) is an open interface between a label switch and a controller, and it provides connection, configuration, event, performance management and synchronization. Traditionally, network management services are classified into five categories: those are configuration, performance, fault, accounting, and security management services. Network management functions...

This article presents a novel network interface hardware architecture, which enables clock synchronization in fault-tolerant distributed real-time systems with sub-μsrange accuracy. The proposed mechanism, which is applicable for any packet-oriented data network, inserts time information into data packets at the interface between the physical layer transceiver and the network controller upon pa...

Most multicast algorithms proposed in the literature assume an arbitrarily long message being communicated as a single packet. Modern networks typically limit the size of the largest packet, and long messages are packetized and transmitted. Such networks also provide network interface support for nodes, which typically includes a coprocessor and memory, to implement the lower layers of the comm...

As the performance of networks and processors increases, the performance of the network interface becomes an increasingly significant bottleneck in the overall performance of the parallel or distributed system. The bottleneck persists because it is fundamentally difficult to design and construct network interfaces. We seek to reduce the difficulty by developing a generic network interface templ...

The Network Interface Framework (NIF) is an object-oriented software architecture for providing networking services in the Choices object-oriented operating system. The NIF supports multiple client subsystems, provides clients with low-latency notiication of received packets, and imposes no particular structure on clients. By contrast, traditional BSD UNIX-style networking does not meet the las...

The primary method for protecting networks today is to use a rewall: a boundary separating the protected network from the untrusted Internet. However, these rewalls o er no protection from internal attacks, scale poorly due to limited rewall processing capacity, and do not support mobile computing. Distributing a rewall to each network host avoids many of these problems, but weakens the securit...