The Evolution of Xtp

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The Evolution of XTP†
Greg Chesson Silicon Graphics Computer Systems Mountain View, Ca 94039-7311 [e-mail]

Abstract
The design of XTP has been a 3 year process so far with roots traceable to work in the 1970’s and 80’s. There have been roughly ten distinct revisions of the protocol. Since Revision 3.4 in June 1989 there has been an effort to stabilize the design. This has been accomplished. The most recent versions - Revision 3.4 and 3.5 - were about 14 months apart whereas earlier versions were 3 to 6 months apart. Fortunately the net effect of the change from Revision 3.4 to 3.5 was to remove mechanism from the design. There have been at least nine distinct software implementations of the protocol. Experience with these implementations has been fed back into the protocol specification. We believe that the functionality in the present design, Revision 3.5 plus Addendum 1a, is strengthened by the number of alternative mechanisms that have been tried and rejected. XTP history and evolution will be reviewed in this paper with a focus on some of the protocol mechanisms that have changed over time.

Introduction
The quantity of network and protocol research can be measured by observing the number of publications in the area. In the 1960’s and early 1970’s most of the papers published in the biennial ACM SIGOPS Proceedings were devoted to operating system topics like paging, process control, and file management. By the 1980’s the balance changed so that most of the papers presented some aspect of networking in the context of operating systems. The papers presented in the first workshop in a series dedicated to protocol research [9] reference much of the work of the 1980’s and suggest that the 1990’s may be a time of significant progress in this area. Contemporary protocol research is influenced by developments in other technical fields. For example VLSI techniques are commonly incorporated into the design of protocols, systems, and media -

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