Towards more expressive transport-layer interfaces
Lars Eggert, Wesley M. Eddy · 2006
The individual layers in the Internet protocol stack provide communication abstractions that expose a limited set of operations and information and otherwise hide layer-internal and lower-layer complexities. This paper argues that the communication abstractions provided by the layers through these interfaces - especially the network/transport and transport/application layer interfaces - do not support efficient and performant communication in an increasingly dynamic Internet. This paper proposes to extend the established interfaces by exposing optional, generic and technology-independent information and operations that allow the development of layer-internal mechanisms to improve operation and performance of the Internet protocols while maintaining the layering abstraction.