We have no such immediate agreement about the services to be provided for transaction processing. Our purpose here is to urge the solution of this problem within the Internet protocol family. This leads to an unsymmetrical communication pattern. For example, a request to read a file from a file server might result in a series of messages, one per file block, in reply. More complex patterns may occur.
Some applications require minimal communication delay.
In many applications, the data to be sent can be compressed into one or a few IP packets. To focus our ideas, we will now discuss several particular types of distributed applications which are of pressing concern to members of the Internet research community, and which require transaction-oriented communication. TCP is appropriate for the bulk transfers needed to update a name server's data base. For this case, reliability is essential, and virtual-circuit setup overhead is negligible compared to the data transfer itself. However, TCP exacts a high cost as a result of its circuit setup and teardown phases.