IAPA: a new protocol architecture based on interacting activities

As the throughput of communication channels grows to the order of GBits/s, communication protocols become the bottleneck in communication applications. The reason for this bottleneck resides partly in the layered protocol architecture, and partly in the complexity of the protocols. This paper presents a new protocol architecture that potentially reduces the protocol overhead by providing a more flexible design structure, giving the opportunity to design protocols suitable for efficient, parallel implementation