International Business Machines Corporation

Yue T Yeung

Soumitra Sarkar

Kathryn Heninger Britton

Diane Phylis Pozefsky

James P Gray

Joshua S Auerbach

Harold D Dykeman

Willibald A Doeringer

John H Wilson

Mohan B Sharma

Allan K Edwards

Raymond F Bird

Roger D Turner

Johny Mathew

Winston W Chung

Tein-Yaw D Chung

Chunhsiang Cheng

Winston W-K Chung

In a multiprotocol environment, a new socket structure which moves the decision on which protocol to use until the time that the connection is actually made between nodes in the network. The new socket structure is created for every endpoint. All the protocols which could potentially be used to send or receive data is sent a request to create a protocol control block at the time the new socket is created. A selection process determines which of the protocols could be used by the endpoint. The new socket then contains information on each selected protocol. At the time a connection is established, any of the selected protocols could be used. The choice of which protocol to use can be based on user preferences, which protocols are available, the name of the service unit.

Kernel socket structure for concurrent multiple protocol access

A Transport Layer Protocol Boundary (TLPB) architecture is described which will permit an application program to run over a non-native transport protocol without first generating a protocol compensation package tailored to the transport protocols assumed by the program's application programming interface and by the available transport provider. All transport functions required by the program are converted to standardized or TLPB representations. When a connection between the first application program and a second remote application is requested, the individual required TLPB transport functions are compared to corresponding functions supported by the transport provider. Compensations are invoked only where there is a mismatch. The node on which the remote application program runs is informed of the compensations so that necessary de-compensation operations can be performed before the data is delivered to the remote application program.

Compensation for mismatched transport protocols in a data communications

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Austin, TX, United States of America

Yue T Yeung