NEAT - A New, Evolutive API and Transport-Layer Architecture for the Internet

Karl-Johan Grinnemo, Anna Brunstrom, Tom Harvey Jones, Godred Fairhurst, Per Hurtig, David Ros

Research output: Contribution to conferencePosterpeer-review

Abstract

There is a growing concern that the Internet transport layer has stagnated and become less adaptive to the requirements imposed by new applications, and that further evolution has become very difficult. This is because a fundamental assumption no longer holds: it can no longer be assumed that the transport layer is only in the scope of end-hosts. The success of TCP and UDP and the ubiquity of middleboxes have led to ossification of both the network infrastructure and the API presented to applications. This has led to the development of workarounds, and a range of point solutions that fail to cover many facets of the problem. To address this issue, this paper identifies requirements for a new transport layer and then proposes a conceptual architecture that we argue is both flexible and evolvable. This new architecture requires that applications interface to the transport at a higher abstraction level, where an application can express communication preferences via a new richer API. Protocol machinery can use this information to decide which of the available transport protocols is used. By placing the protocol machinery in the transport layer, the new architecture can allow for new protocols to be deployed and enable evolution of the transport layer.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2016
Event12th Swedish National Computer Networking Workshop - Sundsvall, Sweden
Duration: 1 Jun 20162 Jun 2016

Workshop

Workshop12th Swedish National Computer Networking Workshop
Abbreviated title(SNCNW 2016)
Country/TerritorySweden
CitySundsvall
Period1/06/162/06/16

Bibliographical note

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 644334 (NEAT). The views expressed are solely those of the authors.

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