Abstract
The software architecture in this paper has evolved through a sequence of research projects at AT&T Bell Laboratories. We review the architecture and describe an experimental reimplementation.
Calls from each device attached to a virtual-circuit switch are managed by a software process, called a line process; the line process translates call requests from the device into a uniform device-independent internal protocol. Host computers and trunks can have numerous lines multiplexed over a single physical link. This process-per-line architecture leads to a profusion of specialized processes, most of them idle, with very simple contexts. Previous implementations used machinedependent code to manage the processes.
The experimental implementation does basic call processing and was completed largely by three people in three months. It is portable. The architecture was reused, but the code was not. The relatively small effort supports the belief that the architecture is suited to call processing and dispels the myth that the complexity of control software prevents limited experiments.
See-Mong Tan is completing his military service in Singapore.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Campbell, R.H., Russo, V., and Johnston, G. Choices: the design of a multiprocessor operating system. In Proc. USENIX C++ Workshop, 1987, pp. 109–123.
CCITT Draft Recommendation 1.361.
Cerf, V.G. and Kirstein, P.T. Issues in packet-network interconnection. Proc. IEEE 66, 11 (1978), 1386–1408.
Condon, J.H., Haley, C.B., McMahon, L.E., and Thompson, K. TPC: tiny phone company. 1978.
Fagen, M.D., Ed. A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System: The Early Years (1875–1925). AT&T Bell Laboratories, Available from AT&T Technologies, Indianapolis (1-800-432-6600), 1975.
Fraser, A.G. Supervision of hosts and terminals. manuscript, 1982.
Fraser, A.G. Towards a universal data transport system. IEEE J. Selected Areas in Communications SAC-1, 5 (1983), 803–816.
Fraser, A.G., Kalmanek, C.R., Kaplan, A.E., Marshall, W.T., and Restrick, R.C. Xunet 2: a nationwide testbed in high-speed networking. In INFOCOM, Florence, Italy, 1992.
Fraser, A.G. and Marshall, W.T. Data Transport in a Byte Stream Network. IEEE J. Selected Areas in Communications 7, 7 (1989), 1020–1033.
Haley, C.B. A method for sharing process stacks in a telephone switch. September 15, 1978.
Jensen, E.D. ArchOS. In ACM SIGOPS Workshop on Operating Systems in Computer Networks, January 1985.
McMahon, L.E. An experimental software organization for a laboratory data switch. In ICC '81, IEEE Intl. Conference on Communications, Vol. 2, 1981, pp. 25.4.1–25.4.4.
McMahon, L.E. and Marshall, W.T. XUNET Programmer's Manual, Vol. I: Call Processing. April 1988.
Murakami, G.J. and Sethi, R. Parallelism as a structuring technique: call processing using the Eslerel language. In Proc. IFIP 92, Elsevier, Madrid, 1992.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Campbell, R. et al. (1992). Control software for virtual-circuit switches: Call processing. In: Bensoussan, A., Verjus, J.P. (eds) Future Tendencies in Computer Science, Control and Applied Mathematics. INRIA 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 653. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56320-2_58
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56320-2_58
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-56320-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47520-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive