The Safenet Lightweight Suite Accelerator (SLA) is a module designed as a real time protocol accelerator for the Navy Safenet standard for Lightweight option. This protocol is designed to provide an efficient method for data transfer between the Safenet medium and the Safenet User. To maximize the benefit of the built-in real-time performance of XTP, the module has to be designed such that it can process incoming as well as outgoing data at or better than the rate of transmission on the media thereby avoiding any impact on the throughput of the station. This can only be achieved with hardware designed for protocol processing that is tightly coupled with embedded processors. The advantaged of the XTP protocol can only be exploited beneficially if mechanisms are provided to process incoming packets at the rate of the media. If this is not achieved, the packets will have to be buffered thereby reducing the throughput of data to the user. The outgoing data has to be processed in parallel with all other simultaneous activities of the station. The SLA module proposed for this effort is designed to address this specific real-time processing requirement.
