VirtualStack: A framework for protocol stack virtualization at the edge

Jens Heuschkel, Immanuel Schweizer, Max Mühlhäuser

Abstract: Applications require connectivity and the network is treated as a black box providing it. Striving to improve this black box, recent research efforts attempt to make the core network more adaptive leveraging new technologies (e.g., software-defined networking). Obviously, any attempt to improve the core network misses out on the first and last hop. Hence, we require solutions that decouple the applications' requirements from the network at the edge. In this paper, we present VirtualStack, as a framework addressing this issue. For each individual application, VirtualStack supports multiple optimized network stacks and dynamically chooses the current optimal network stack, possibly taking into account measurements and commands received from the core network. As a proof of concept, our paper demonstrates protocol transformations between UDP and DCCP without any changes to the application, switching delay, or loss in throughput. While the prototype introduces some overhead, it provides a maximal throughput of 4.36 GBit/s.