Towards the Virtualization of Transport-level Functions and Protocols

The Transport layer of OSI and TCP/IP models provides all necessary services for end-to-end communication between application processes. There is a huge number of works and propositions of Transport level protocols and services to satisfy applications requirements. Unfortunately, the vast majority of applications refer only to TCP for reliable and ordered services or to UDP for unreliable and low latency services. This is due to the fact that the deployment of all new Transport protocol proposal is mainly hampered by (1) the poor socket API exposed by the Transport layer to applications, (2) the introduction of middleboxes within the Internet and (3) the tedious work required to modified Operating System kernel. At the same time, the development of network functions virtualization opportunities is growing in the world of carrier networks and more generally. In this paper, after a survey on Transport protocols deployment issues, we present a novel approach to realize the effective deployment of Transport protocols and services by leveraging virtualization principles. At last, we present a new way to efficiently manage Transport functions and to dynamically build Transport services through a graph-based protocol model.