A multiprocessor approach for meeting the processing requirements for OSI

To meet the increased communication processing requirements of high-speed networks, a multiprocessing network interface is considered for processing multiple layers of a communication protocol stack. In particular, the processing of the open systems interconnection (OSI) layers 2 to 6 on the network interface are considered. OSI processing is computationally expensive because of the inclusion of the transfer syntax conversion at the presentation layer. The approach taken is to process different packets in parallel. The results obtained from simulations indicate that the approach has promise for OSI processing at higher rates