Breaking Up the Transport Logjam
Bryan Ford
| Janardhan Iyengar
|
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology
| Franklin & Marshall College
|
Published in
Seventh ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-VII)
October 6-7, 2008, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Abstract:
Current Internet transports conflate transport semantics
with endpoint addressing and flow regulation,
creating roadblocks to Internet evolution
that we propose to address with a new layering model.
Factoring endpoint addressing (port numbers)
into a separate Endpoint Layer permits
incremental rollout of new or improved transports at OS or application level,
enables transport-oblivious firewall/NAT traversal,
improves transport negotiation efficiency,
and simplifies endpoint address space administration.
Factoring congestion control into a separate Flow Layer
cleanly enables in-path performance optimizations
such as on satellite or wireless links,
permits incremental rollout
of new congestion control schemes within administrative domains,
frees congestion control evolution from
the yoke of “TCP-friendliness,”
and facilitates multihoming and multipath communication.
Though this architecture is ambitious,
existing protocols can act as
starting points for the new layers—UDP or UDP-Lite for the Endpoint Layer,
and Congestion Manager or DCCP for the Flow Layer—providing
both immediate deployability
and a sound basis for long-term evolution.
Full Paper:
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HotNets Presentation Slides:
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