An extensible protocol architecture for application-specific networking

Abstract

Plexus is a networking architecture that allows applications to achieve high performance with customized protocols. Application-specific protocols are written in a typesafe language and installed dynamically into the operating system kernel. Because these protocols execute within the kernel, they can access the network interface and other operating system services with low overhead. Protocols implemented with Plexus outperform equivalent protocols implemented on conventional monolithic systems. Plexus runs in the context of the SPIN extensible operating system. 1 Introduction This paper describes the design and implementation of Plexus, a protocol architecture that allows arbitrary applications to define application-specific protocols. Plexus allows protocol processing to be tailored using application-level knowledge, thus providing the framework for supporting new protocols [CSZ92], and implementing optimizations to existing protocols such as integrated layer processing and applica...