Amazon.com description: Product Description: The purpose of this book is to discuss some of the issues involved in the design and implementation of protocols - particularly protocols above the medium access layer - that are able to exploit the full potential of local-area and optical-fiber networks. The main issue in this area continues to be whether or not new protocols are necessary. On the one hand, a number of new ``high-speed'' protocols have been invented. On the other hand, some recent work shows that clever tuning and implementation of existing protocol architectures can also deliver high throughput and quick response times. The papers presented in this book shed some light on the issue.