PENCIL/C concurrent programming of high speed communication protocols

In high-speed networking, increasing transmission rates at decreasing error rates have caused a gap between physical performance of the transmission medium and the end-to-end performance offered to the user. High-speed protocols of lower layers have been developed, in some cases based on specially designed VLSI components, e.g., XTP. But lower layers as well as higher levels of communication protocols require techniques for deriving efficient software implementation from specification. A straightforward method achieving an efficient concurrent solution is introduced. It is based on higher Petri nets. One important part of this method is the concurrent programming language PENCIL/C, which is introduced. Some excerpts from an XTP implementation show the power of this concept