Overlay networks are used today in a variety of distributed systems ranging from file-sharing and storage systems to communication infrastructures. However, designing, building and adapting these overlays to the intended application and the target environment is a di#cult and time consuming process.

Integrating protocol data manipulations is a strategy for increasing the throughput of network protocols. The idea is to combine a series of protocol layers into a pipeline so as to access message data more efficiently. This paper introduces a widely-applicable technique for integrating protocols. This technique not only improves performance, but also preserves the modularity of protocol layers by automatically integrating independently expressed protocols. The paper also describes a prototype integration tool, and studies the performance limits and scalability of protocol integration. Department of Computer Science The University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 1 This research was sponsored in part by DARPA Contract DABT63-91-C-0030. 1 Introduction Data manipulation---e.g., encryption, presentation formatting, compression, computing checksums---is one of the costliest aspects of data transfer [3, 4, 6]. This is because reading, and possibly writing, each byte of data in a message invo...

This white paper describes Scout, a new operating system being designed for systems connected to the National Information Infrastructure (NII). Scout provides a communication-oriented software architecture for building operating system code that is specialized for the different systems that we expect to be available on the NII. It includes an explicit path abstraction that both facilitates effective resource management and permits optimizations of the critical path that I/O data follows. These path-enabled optimizations, along with the application of advanced compiler techniques, result in a system that has both predictable and scalable performance. June 17, 1994 Department of Computer Science The University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 1 Introduction As the National Information Infrastructure (NII) evolves, and digital computer networks become ubiquitous, communication will play an increasingly important role in computer systems. In fact, a recent report on the NII rejects the term "compu...

Writing software to control networks is important and difficult. It must be efficient, reliable, and flexible. Conduits+ is a framework for network software that has been used to implement the signalling system of a multi-protocol ATM access switch. An earlier version was used to implement TCP/IP. It reduces the complexity of network software, makes it easier to extend or modify network protocols, and is sufficiently efficient. Conduits+ shows the power of a componentized object-oriented framework and of common object-oriented design patterns.

Currently, researchers designing and implementing largescale overlay services employ disparate techniques at each stage in the production cycle: design, implementation, experimentation, and evaluation. As a result, complex and tedious tasks are often duplicated leading to ine#ective resource use and di#culty in fairly comparing competing algorithms. In this paper, we present MACEDON, an infrastructure that provides facilities to: i) specify distributed algorithms in a concise domainspecific language; ii) generate code that executes in popular evaluation infrastructures and in live networks; iii) leverage an overlay-generic API to simplify the interoperability of algorithm implementations and applications; and iv) enable consistent experimental evaluation. We have used MACEDON to implement and evaluate a number of algorithms, including AMMO, Bullet, Chord, NICE, Overcast, Pastry, Scribe, and SplitStream, typically with only a few hundred lines of MACEDON code. Using our infrastructure, we are able to accurately reproduce or exceed published results and behavior demonstrated by current publicly available implementations.

Abstract. This paper describes an advanced simulation environment which is used to examine, validate, and predict the performance of mobile wireless network systems. This simulation environment overcomes many of the limitations found with analytical models, experimentation, and other commercial network simulators available on the market today. We identify a set of components which make up mobile wireless systems and describe a set of flexible modules which can be used to model the various components and their integration. These models are developed using the Maisie simulation language. By modeling the various components and their integration, this simulation environment is able to accurately predict the performance bottlenecks of a multimedia wireless network system being developed at UCLA, determine the trade-off point between the various bottlenecks, and provide performance measurements and validation of algorithms which are not possible through experimentation and too complex for analysis. 1.

Prolac is a new statically-typed, object-oriented language for network protocol implementation. It is designed for readability, extensibility, and real-world implementation; most previous protocol languages, in contrast, have been based on hard-to-implement theoretical models and have focused on verification. We present a working Prolac TCP implementation directly derived from 4.4BSD. Our implementation is modular---protocol processing is logically divided into minimally-interacting pieces; readable---Prolac encourages top-down structure and naming intermediate computations; and extensible---subclassing cleanly separates protocol extensions like delayed acknowledgements and slow start. The Prolac compiler uses simple global analysis to remove expensive language features like dynamic dispatch, resulting in end-to-end performance comparable to an unmodified Linux 2.0 TCP.

A key step in the semantic analysis of network traffic is to parse the traffic stream according to the high-level protocols it contains. This process transforms raw bytes into structured, typed, and semantically meaningful data fields that provide a high-level representation of the traffic. However, constructing protocol parsers by hand is a tedious and error-prone affair due to the complexity and sheer number of application protocols. This paper presents binpac, a declarative language and compiler designed to simplify the task of constructing robust and efficient semantic analyzers for complex network protocols. We discuss the design of the binpac language and a range of issues in generating efficient parsers from high-level specifications. We have used binpac to build several protocol parsers for the “Bro” network intrusion detection system, replacing some of its existing analyzers (handcrafted in C++), and supplementing its operation with analyzers for new protocols. We can then use Bro’s powerful scripting language to express application-level analysis of network traffic in high-level terms that are both concise and expressive. binpac is now part of the open-source Bro distribution.

Networks are hard to manage and in spite of all the so called holistic management packages, things are getting worse. We argue that the difficulty of network management can partly be attributed to a fundamental flaw in the existing architecture: protocols expose all their internal details and hence, the complexity of the ever-evolving data plane encumbers the management plane. Guided by this observation, in this paper we explore an alternative approach and propose Complexity Oblivious Network Management (CONMan), a network architecture in which the management interface of data-plane protocols includes minimal protocol-specific information. This restricts the operational complexity of protocols to their implementation and allows the management plane to achieve high level policies in a structured fashion. We built the CON-Man interface of a few protocols and a management tool that can achieve high-level configuration goals based on this interface. Our preliminary experience with applying this tool to real world VPN configuration indicates the architecture’s potential to alleviate the difficulty of configuration management.

Introduction Filters are a common data-manipulation abstraction in networking, operating systems, and simulation software. Filters read data from a single source and write data to a single destination. In filter applications, data flows from a source to a sink through intermediate filters. Logically, filters are separate, modular entities. Modular implementations unfortunately suffer a substantial performance penalty relative to integrated implementations. Where performance matters most, systems programmers will sacrifice the modular design for the greater speed of an integrated design. We present a new compiler optimization, Filter Fusion, that eliminates the overhead of a modular design of independent filters. Our algorithm automates the integration of arbitrary, independently designed filters. FFC, our Filter Fusion compiler, composes filters and produces code that is as efficient as handintegrated code. The optimized code can achieve up to a two-fold improvement