Parallelism and performance in communication subsystems

Abstract

This paper discusses the impact of various design and implementation factors on the performance of a communication subsystem. Measurements obtained from two different software implementations of the same protocol (ISO 8802-2 logical link control protocol type 2) over three different experimental hardware platforms are used as a basis for comparison. The impact of exploiting parallelism is especially emphasized. The effects of software structure and optimized hand coding are also discussed. Although some results pertain to only one specific protocol, similarities with other connection-oriented protocols can be drawn.<>