Mechanism for providing full utilization of high data rate serial

Abstract

State of the art data compression-protocol engines provide high compression ratios for improving data transport over a high data rate serial communication link. However, a respective data port of data terminal equipment may not be capable of being clocked at a sufficiently high clock rate, which limits the performance of the data compression-protocol engine, and prevents full utilization of the available bandwidth of the serial link. To remedy this problem, data terminal equipment and data compression-protocol engine components that provide auxiliary data communication port connectivity are employed. Data from the data terminal equipment is clocked to the data compression-protocol engine over a plurality of parallel data paths. This increases the effective clock rate and enables the data compression-protocol engine to output a compressed data stream that fully utilizes the bandwidth of the network. The data compression-protocol engine is programmable for either parallel data path transport or single path data transport to the network interface. In one embodiment, plural data streams from the data terminal equipment are compressed and then time division multiplexed onto the network. In a second embodiment, the data streams are statistically multiplexed into a single compressed data stream to the network.