This thesis presents the design of an Ethernet local-area network interface for embedded transputer systems. It is based upon parallel software which manages the TCP/IP family of protocols, passing packets between a single transputer, which connects to the network, and application processes which run on an arbitrary number of other transputers. The different layers of the protocol processing - Ethernet control, IP and TCP are all performed in separate parallel processes. Extra routing processors, arranged in a tree configuration, provide access to the lower IP and Ethernet layers from as many TCP and application processes as desired. Investigation of the processor utilisation and channel throughput of each of the parallel processes has led to the rejection of hardware-assistance in the form of a complex shared-memory, multi-processor architecture. Instead, a double pipeline of processes, running on a small pipeline of transputers, communicate exclusively using the transputers' serial links. This scheme is shown to provide good load balancing and to be a cost-effective way of exchanging traffic between a transputer application and a user process running on a high-performance workstation at data rates of over 950 kbytes/second - almost the entire available bandwidth of a 10 Mbit/sec Ethernet. All software is written in the occam programming language. As well as presenting the design of the protocol software, the thesis includes performance measurements and reports on two applications which were built upon the initial work. These are a networked implementation of the INMOS Iserver, which allows access to transputers from anywhere on the network, and an embedded instrumentation system which pre-processes data from an ion microbeam and passes part-analysed results to a conventional workstation for display, archiving and user control of the experiment.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:308626 |
| Date | January 1995 |
| Creators | Peel, R. M. A. |
| Publisher | University of Surrey |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/770240/ |
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