Deliverable D2.2 - Core Transport System, with both Low-level and High-level Components

Abstract

This document presents the core transport system in NEAT, as used for development of the reference implementation of the NEAT System. The document describes the components necessary to realise the basic Transport Services provided by the NEAT User API, with the description of a set of NEAT building blocks and their related design choices. The design of this core transport system takes into consideration the Transport Services and the API (defined in Task 1.3) and in close coordination with the overall architecture (Task 1.2). To realise the Transport Services provided by the API, a set of transport functionalities has to be provided by the NEAT Core Transport System. These functionalities take the form of several building blocks, or NEAT Components, each representing an associated implementation activity. Some of the components are needed to ensure the basic operation of the NEAT System—e.g., a NEAT Flow Endpoint, a callback-based NEAT API Framework, the NEAT Logic and the functionality to Connect to a name. Additional components are needed for: (a) ensuring connectivity, by means of mechanisms for discovery of path support for different protocols; (b) supporting end-to-end security; (c) the ability to apply different policies to influence the decision-making process of the transport system; (d) providing other important functionalities (e.g., a user-space SCTP stack, or gathering statistics for users or system administrators). This document updates Deliverable D2.1; in particular, the descriptions of NEAT components presented here correspond to the implementation status at the time of writing, and as such they replace those in D2.1.A New, Evolutive API and Transport-Layer Architecture for the Internet (NEAT