XTP - EFFICIENT PARALLEL SOFTWARE IMPLEMENTATION BASED ON A PETRI NET SPECIFICATION TECHNIQUE

To increase protocol processing performance and to support a variety of new applications distributed across a multiplicity of computers the Xpress Transfer Protocol (XTP) is one approach. XTP is developed as a protocol that would facilitate VLSI design and which would be suitable for operation on high bandwidth-delay product networks. The XTP protocol definition is based on a set of finite state machines which are only created to be guidelines to understand the protocol. Since we have developed a straightforward method to derive a parallel implementation out of a high level petri net description, the formal specification of XTP is carried out by this description technique. Another advantage of the petri net concept is the suitability to describe and uncover protocol inherent parallelism and to fix the desired granularity of the implementation.