Enabling Configurable, Extensible, and Modular Network Stacks

Abstract

Modern networks and the applications that use them are increasingly specialized; each application increasingly uses a bespoke network stack which integrates desired protocols, services, and APIs. This thesis will describe two systems, Bertha and Congestion Control Plane (CCP), which incorporate new abstractions to navigate this new setting from the perspective of congestion control algorithm and the application’s network API, respectively. Bertha uses a new abstraction called a Chunnel to represent network services, e.g., hardware offloads of application functionality, publish-subscribe communication services, or encryption. CCP decouples congestion control algorithm implementations from network datapaths by designing an abstract datapath which supports collecting custom measurements and subsequently applying rate or window enforcement.