A communication system supporting large datagrams on a local area network

摘要

AbstractThis paper describes an implementation of a software interface designed for use from within UNIXUNIX is a trademark of A TT Bell Laboratories.application programs for network communications. This interface provides the abstraction of possibly very large datagrams, supports ‘scatter‐gather’ facilities, and maintains standard network addresses consisting of (host number; port number) pairs. This interface has been provided on different data communication facilities, allowing uniform program access to those facilities. The particular implementation developed for a local area network is described, and performance results obtained are examined and compared with those obtained from a conventional datagram interface to that network. The results obtained confirm that the abstraction of very large datagrams enables the construction of an efficient mechanism for process‐to‐process communications over the network that is not only more convenient, but also has significant performance advantages over the use of conventional (small)