TEMPO: a lightweight transport protocol

This paper presents a lightweight transport protocol called TEMPO which is intended to satisfy the requirements of advanced applications and high-speed network properties. The versatile transport service of TEMPO allows transport users to define their appropriate transport service by composing elementary message streams. The arrangement of the streams is defined by interaction patterns which contain the transport addresses of the corresponding transport users and their relations. The pattern-directed addressing scheme allows TEMPO to support different service forms, e.g. a notification form to transmit single messages, a transaction form to exchange request and reply messages or a connection form to transfer uni- or bidirectionally an unlimited number of messages. Independent of the service form, TEMPO offers a multicasting and relaying function which can be used repeatedly and in various combinations. Based on network properties such as low error rate and high bandwidth, TEMPO was designed as a lightweight protocol: The instruction path and the number of network packet exchanges are minimized for an error free communication