High performance networking and the modular communication machine (MCM) approach

The authors introduce an approach to designing high-performance communication systems, which includes the modular communication machine (MCM) concept. Despite the high bandwidth of optical links and the high throughput obtainable from a myriad of media access control techniques, the end users of current communication networks have hardly any better network capacity than before, because the bottleneck has moved to the soft parts of the systems. In the design of high-performance communication systems numerous architectural and implementation issues are encountered. After a brief discussion of these issues and some of the approaches currently proposed to tackle them, the MCM concept, which is based on a modular and generic structure, is presented.