Fast Local Internet Protocol

The Fast Local Internet Protocol (FLIP) is a suite of internet protocols, conceived for distributed applications. FLIP was designed at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to support remote procedure calling in the Amoeba distributed operating system.^[1] In the OSI model, FLIP occupies layer 3, thus replacing IP, but it also obviates the need for a transport-level protocol like TCP.

FLIP is a connectionless protocol designed to support transparency (with respect to the underlying network layers of the OSI model: 2. data link and 1. physical), group communication, secure communication and easy network management. The following FLIP properties helps to achieve the efficiency requirements:

• FLIP identifies entities called network service access points (NSAPs).
• FLIP uses a one way mapping between the “private” address, used to register an endpoint of a network connection, and the “public” address used to advertise the endpoint.
• FLIP routes messages based on NSAP.
• FLIP uses a bit in the message header to request transmission of sensitive messages across trusted networks.

See also

• IL (network protocol)

References

1. M. Frans Kaashoek, Robbert van Renesse, Hans van Staveren, and Andrew S. Tanenbaum. 1993. FLIP: an internetwork protocol for supporting distributed systems. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 11, 1 (Feb. 1993), 73–106. https://doi.org/10.1145/151250.151253