VTL: A Virtual Transport Layer for Deployable and Configurable Transport Protocols

Internet and its evolutions are fundamentally based on the unique TCP/IP model, whose primary protocol of the Transport layer (L4) is the TCP (and somewhat UDP). Despite its well-known limitations, TCP is still widely deployed and used on the Internet. Nearly all the literature’s propositions to overcome TCP’s limitations are not deployed in the mainstream operating systems (OS) and/or face limited use by the Internet’s applications. This situation leads to the ossification or sclerosis of the Transport layer that is a significant barrier to the introduction of innovations in this layer of the Internet’s TCP/IP architecture. Thus, this paper proposes to address this issue and focuses on two main contributions. First, we design and implement a Virtual Transport Layer (VTL) system able to dynamically deploy Transport protocols within the end-systems’ OS. Second, to facilitate the use and stimulate the adoption of the proposed architecture (and the L4 protocols it deploys), we provide the approach and mechanisms necessary to allow TCP-based applications to use transparently any Transport protocol other than TCP. Experiments show the correctness of VTL and its ability to quickly deploy protocols. Further, we show that the deployed protocols achieve significant performances under VTL.