Transparent flow mapping for NEAT
Felix Weinrank, Michael Tüxen · 2017
The NEAT library provides application developers with a unified and platform independent API for network communication, regardless of the underlying network protocol. NEAT's abstraction layer approach allows the integration of new network protocols and transport features, transparently to the user. With QUIC, RTMFP and WebRTC, several widely deployed protocols make use of mapping multiple data streams to a single transport connection. However, the usage of multiplexing requires application developers to spend additional effort and has to be supported by both endpoints. This paper describes an approach to integrate multiplexing functionality into the NEAT library, giving application developers a simple way to use the benefits of mapping multiple data streams to a single transport connection without additional coding effort. We describe our considerations about feature negotiation, connection handling and data transmission for multiplexed data streams, an introduction to the NEAT library, the implementation details as well as measurement results and future steps.