EECS Publication
Locating Interoperability in the Network Stack
Micah Beck, Terry Moore
The conventional view within the Internet community is that IP is the appropriate basis for interoperability in the network stack. However, recent developments in IP networking and link layer technologies that cannot be supported by the IP standard have increased the pressure towards creating non-interoperable network domains. In this paper we explore one avenue of attack on these problems, using the End-to-End Principle as a guide to help locate a point within the network stack where a greater degree of interoperability may be found. Our conclusion is that the appropriate location of the requisite interoperability is in a buffer management layer located between the link and network layers, which we call the transit layer. We argue that a transit layer protocol that abstracts the particular characteristics of different intermediate node resources (in the dimensions of data transfer, storage and processing) while being more general and sitting below the network layer in the stack, could exhibit greater deployment scalability and provide a broader foundation for network interoperability than IP.
Published 2004-02-15 05:00:00 as ut-cs-04-520 (ID:181)
ut-cs-04-520.pdf
ut-cs-04-520_2004.02.16.pdf
ut-cs-04-520_2004.02.18.pdf
ut-cs-04-520_2004.05.10.pdf