VTL: Timely Deployment and Seamless Adoption of From Scratch Network Protocols

Internet Transport layer plays a major role in the end-to-end QoS delivered to applications on end-systems. Until now, it has been subject to several propositions to improve its extensibility and adaptability to the rapid evolution of the Internet. Unfortunately, most of these proposals face deployment obstacles and encounter shy-of-adoption on the Inter-net. This leads to sclerosis of the Transport layer. In order to address this issue, we propose VTL, a protocol deployment and data delivery management system aiming to timely and dynamically deploy protocol mechanisms to ensure optimal data moving between end-systems. VTL provides support for legacy applications without requiring their modification. VTL is built on a combination of two Linux kernel subsystems: TC that hooks under IP layer to process outcoming packets, and XDP that attaches to NIC driver to early process incoming packets. TC and XDP are also part of eBPF infrastructure which eliminates most of security concerns and provides the ability to insert safe bytecode within the OS kernel from a userland program. Experimentations under Linux 5.3.5 (i) show VTL ability to quick off the deployment of protocol and to ease their adoption by applications, and (ii) evaluate VTL performances by taking legacy TCP stack as reference.