Patent ID: 7124198

Claim:
A method to configure transport segments of a transport-level protocol for transporting an upper layer protocol transfer, where the transport-level protocol is layered above a network-level protocol, and where each transport segment comprises a standard transport header and a body separate from and following the standard transport header, the method comprising the steps of: receiving upper layer segments which are segments of the upper layer protocol, where each upper layer segment includes a respective original remote direct memory location indicating where to place its payload directly into remote memory; determining that at least some of the received upper layer segments do not integrally fit within transport segments and in response splitting those upper layer segments to create split segments; aligning framing headers with the transport segments by putting a framing header in the body of each transport segment that carries a split segment; and putting segment description information in each framing header, the segment description information indicating a remote direct memory location for the split segment that is being carried by the segment, where the remote direct memory location is determined based on the original remote direct memory location of the corresponding upper layer segment from which the split segment was obtained, and where the remote direct memory location in the framing header allows direct placement in remote memory.