Communication within the NetSolve system is achieved through the socket layer. We chose to use the TCP/IP protocol because it ensures reliable communication between processes. The fact that a process is limited to a certain number of simultaneous TCP/IP connections was not a problem (given the NetSolve specification.)
To ensure the correct operation in an heterogeneous environment, NetSolve uses the XDR protocol between hosts with incompatible data formats. Actually, this is the default protocol before two hosts agree that they use the same data format. Not using XDR when not necessary is an issue here, since we expect to transfer large amounts of data over the network (the user data).