Light-weight TCP/IP Stack

(Short Stack)

If one analyzes what actually transpires during the operation of a full TCP/IP protocol stack between two level 2 connected computers you will observe that there is a massive amount of code that is executed to no purpose.  The idea of the light-weight stack is to eliminate all functions which are not applicable to communicating between two directly connected machines (level-2 connected). Directly connected machines have a very low probability of transmission errors, different congestion control requirements etc.  The application level protocols must be oblivious to the fact that they are not using a standard complete TCP/IP protocol stack. The idea would then be to push packets up the light-weight stack when they come from machines on the same level-2 segment to avoid the unnecessary overhead of the more general purpose protocol stack. 

Related project: see Data Link Frame Aggregation Protocol