Transitions: A Protocol-Independent View of the Future Internet
Bastian Alt, Markus Weckesser, Christian Becker, Matthias Hollick, Sounak Kar, Anja Klein, Robin Klose, Roland Kluge, Heinz Koeppl, Boris Koldehofe, Wasiur R. KhudaBukhsh, Manisha Luthra, Mahdi Mousavi, Max Mühlhäuser, Martin Pfannemüller, Amr Rizk, Andy Schürr, Ralf Steinmetz · Proceedings of the IEEE · 2019
Countless novel approaches to communication protocols, overlay networks, and distributed middleware are published every year, yet the adoption of such novel findings in the global Internet landscape progresses at a slow pace. Many of such new communication mechanisms excel (only) under specific deployment conditions, while user mobility and application usage patterns lead to dynamic operation conditions. This mismatch is one reason that makes a wide deployment of new specialized mechanisms particularly hard as observed, for example, for multipath transport protocol extensions until the emergence of multipath transmission control protocol (TCP). This paper formalizes the concept of Transitions, i.e., a method to instrumentalize adaptivity at runtime in communication systems. It allows to exchange communication mechanisms in a running system to optimize the communication quality. In the following, we describe the building blocks required to: 1) capture the features and relations within a communication system and 2) express and optimize the decision making process in such a system. We show how this concept maps intuitively to the Internet model which makes a protocol-independent deployment of applications feasible in the future Internet.