A Target-Agnostic Protocol-Independent Interface for the Transport Layer

2025-09-25

AI Summary

Transport-layer protocol development is hindered by environmental heterogeneity and the absence of high-level, target-agnostic programming abstractions, impeding automated analysis, formal verification, and programmable transport research. To address this, we propose TINF—the first event-driven, state-aware, high-level programming abstraction specifically designed for transport protocols—achieving full decoupling between protocol logic and execution targets. TINF employs a C-like restricted syntax to express protocol behavior and introduces a target-agnostic instruction set supporting core operations including data reassembly, packet generation, scheduling, and timer management. It features dual backends: DPDK and Linux XDP. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that TINF significantly improves development efficiency, ensures cross-platform semantic consistency, and establishes a unified foundation for formal modeling and automated verification of transport protocols.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Plan Execution and Monitoring
• Application Domains: Transportation
• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

Transport protocols are fundamental to network communications, continuously evolving to meet the demands of new applications, workloads, and network architectures while running in a wide range of execution environments (a.k.a targets). We argue that this diversity across protocols and targets calls for a high-level, target-agnostic programming abstraction for the transport layer. Specifically, we propose to specify transport protocols as high-level programs that take an event and flow state as input, and using constrained C-like constructs, produce the updated state along with target-agnostic instructions for key transport operations such as data reassembly, packet generation and scheduling, and timer manipulations. We show the benefits of our high-level transport programs by developing multiple transport protocols in our programming framework called TINF, developing two TINF- compliant backends, one in DPDK and one in Linux eXpress DataPath, and deploying TINF programs for multiple protocols across both backends. Inspired by the benefits unlocked by L2/L3 packet-processing languages like P4, we believe target-agnostic transport programs can reduce the development effort for transport protocols, enable automated analysis and formal verification of the transport layer, and further research in programmable targets for transport protocols.

Problem

• Proposing a target-agnostic programming abstraction for transport protocols
• Developing transport protocols using high-level programs with constrained C-like constructs
• Reducing development effort and enabling automated analysis for transport layer

Innovation

• Target-agnostic transport layer programming abstraction
• Protocol specification using constrained C-like constructs
• Automated analysis and verification for transport protocols