A method and apparatus for close-proximity communication. The close-proximity communication method performed by a transmitter includes generating a physical layer (PHY) frame including a PHY preamble, a frame header, and a payload field, and transmitting the generated PHY frame to a receiver, in which the frame header may include a media access control (MAC) header, a header check sequence (HCS), and a Reed-Solomon (RS) parity bit.

Tightly-coupled, loosely connected distributed systems can be implemented more energy efficient and optimized for computational overhead via multi-protocol heterogeneous packet-based transport. When receiving a plurality of packets from a root complex where contents of each packet from the plurality of packets organized in accordance with a first protocol, a sequence number is added to each packet and a packet type is identified. Every packet in the first plurality of packets is encapsulated into at least one packet organized in accordance with a second protocol to form a second plurality of packets organized in accordance with the second protocol. All the packets from the second plurality of packets can be handled via Direct Memory Access. A write-only communication scheme can be implemented using doorbell and command registers for more efficient data reading and writing in distributed systems.