A Host Interface to the Dtm High Speed Network

Abstract

DTM dynamic synchronous transfer mode, is a new time division multiplexing technique for fiber networks currently being developed and implemented at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. This paper describes the hardware and software aspects of the design of a SBus host interface to the DTM network for a Sun SPARCstation. The interface is based on a dual ported shared memory residing on the interface card and accessible over the SBus from the host CPU. The host operating system allocates message buffers directly in this memory. The interface has hardware support for segmenting and reassembling packets to and from the data units of the DTM. The software part of the interface manages the shared memory and the virtual circuits provided by the DTM network.