On the Exchange of Messages between Processes

Abstract

In this paper a message exchange protocol is defined which is currently under design for the AMOS Operating System. This protocol uses a set of communication primitives which in a network of computers are necessary to spread the operating sytem across the network. In order to achieve this goal the communications primitives must be endowed with properties for process synchronization. Most of the past work in computer network design seems to concentrate on the problems of network topology, transmission technologies and transmission protocols. All these questions are of secondary import to us. We assume that messages or message packets can be exchanged error-free between any of two host processors.