A wireless communication system hosts a plurality of processes in
accordance with a communication protocol. The system includes application
specific instruction set processors (ASISPs) that provided computation
support for the process. Each ASISP is capable of executing a subset of
the functions of a communication protocol. A scheduler is used to
schedule the ASISPs in a time-sliced algorithm so that each ASISP
supports several processes. In this architecture, the ASISP actively
performs computations for one of the supported processes (active process)
at any given time. The state information of each process supported by a
particular ASISP is stored in a memory bank that is uniquely associated
with the ASISP. When a scheduler instructs an ASISP to change which
process is the active process, the state information for the inactivated
process is stored in the memory bank and the state information for the
newly activated process is retrieved from the memory bank.