Subject: [apps-discuss] BOF on Transport Services (TAPS)

From: Michael Welzl <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 15:39:32 +0100

Dear all,

A BOF called "TAPS" has been approved as a non-WG-forming BOF in London. The point of this activity is to move away from applications choosing "TCP" or "UDP" by letting them select a service instead. This is bound to let the transport layer evolve - details are at: https://sites.google.com/site/transportprotocolservices/

Much of this is about the API that the transport layer exposes to applications. We had a bar BOF in Vancouver, where the major criticism was that we might be ignoring what applications *really* want, as many aren't really using the socket layer anyway. We're trying to counter this criticism as good as we can, because we really do want to do something useful here, something that does help applications. e.g., if the socket layer provided a richer set of services than "TCP" and "UDP", some of these services might be reasonably replicated in higher-level APIs; also, these higher-level APIs could be improved by using a richer set of services underneath - we've begun analyzing some in draft-hurtig-tsvwg-transport-apis

What's more, if there was a common API that's independent of the transport protocol, it wouldn't be necessary to implement functions like PMTUD, things for middlebox traversal etc. in the application per protocol, but these functions could be taken care of underneath the API, leading to a better integrated networking stack.

At this point, I'm hoping for folks from the applications area to join our mailing list and participate in discussions - raise your concerns there and help us create something that will really be useful. the list management page is at: https://sympa.uio.no/ifi.uio.no/info/transport-services

Cheers,
Michael