A Target-Agnostic Protocol-Independent Interface for the Transport Layer
This addresses the problem of costly and complex transport protocol development for network engineers and system developers, offering a novel approach to improve portability and maintainability.
The paper tackles the difficulty of implementing and evolving transport protocols by introducing transport programs, a target-independent abstraction that centralizes protocol logic, enabling efficient execution on different targets with performance comparable to hand-optimized implementations.
Transport protocols continue to evolve to meet the demands of new applications, workloads, and network environments, yet implementing and evolving transport protocols remains difficult and costly. High-performance transport stacks tightly interweave protocol behavior with system-level mechanisms such as packet I/O, memory management, and concurrency control, resulting in large code bases where protocol logic is scattered and hard to modify -- an issue exacerbated by modern heterogeneous execution environments. This paper introduces transport programs, a target-independent abstraction that precisely and centrally captures a transport protocol's reactions to relevant transport events using abstract instructions for key transport operations such as data reassembly, packet generation and scheduling, and timer manipulation, while leaving execution strategy and low-level mechanisms to the target. We show that transport programs can express a diverse set of transport protocols, be efficiently realized on targets built over DPDK and Linux XDP, achieve performance comparable to hand-optimized implementations, and enable protocol changes and portability across targets without modifying underlying infrastructure.