TIPC: Transparent IPC

 

As now days applications are growing in exponential way. Mobile phones are now only for voice communication. Now days voice communications are secondary for development prospect. Now the more focus is on proving high availability of services. To provide every architecture has now support of distributed environment. So when we talk about distributed systems we are talking about multiple instances of our data. So whenever there is some changes in one instance of data that must be properly synchronized with other replica as well. So for that we have to think about transport protocols like TCP or SCTP. So these protocols have their set of requirements for establishing communication.

 

So when there is internal communication among replicas of data, we found TCP little clumsy. So Ericson has developed and deployed a new solution for their products named Transparent Inter process communication (TIPC). TCP lacks functional addressing and addressing transparency. TCP uses mapping in general statically, so it is very poor approach to use it in dynamic real-time environment. TCP is good enough for large messages but when we have to just synchronize with very short message still we have to follow the whole cycle of TCP protocol standard. So to overcome that cycle TIPC uses some direct communication mechanism having address transparency. So where in case of short message TCP uses minimum 9 packets transfer , TIPC can do that in 1 or 2 packets flow. So if we check for inner node transportation of messages we have 35% better performance over TCP.

 

Assumptions for better implementation of TIPC

1. Most messages cross only one direct hop.
   
2. Transfer time for most messages is short.
   
3. Most messages are passed over intra cluster connections.
   
4. Packet loss rate is normally low; retransmission is infrequent.
   
5. Available bandwidth and memory volume is normally high.
   
6. For all relevant bearers packets are check-summed by hardware.
   
7. The number of inter-communicating nodes is relatively static and limited at any moment in time.
   
8. Security is a less crucial issue in closed clusters than on the Internet.