COMMUNICATION ARCHITECTURE FOR HIGH SPEED NETWORKING

A new data communications architecture is disclosed in which high level communications services provided to a host processor are arranged into independent horizontal functions that are processed in parallel. Any conditional dependencies among the horizontal functions are resolved by a connector that interfaces the horizontal functions to an application layer of the host processor. Additionally, communication performance is enhanced by allowing adaptive specifications of a high-level protocol employed in the architecture for providing the high-level services. This adaptive specification may be initiated in response to changing user requirements or varying network parameters. Then, a high-level protocol specification is obtained by choosing appropriate values for parameters of the horizontal functions which are parametrically programmable.