NSDI '05 Abstract
Trickles: A Stateless Network Stack for Improved Scalability, Resilience, and
Flexibility
Alan Shieh, Andrew C. Myers, and Emin Gün Sirer, Cornell University
Abstract
Traditional operating system interfaces and network protocol
implementations force system state to be kept on both sides of a
connection. Such state ties the connection to an endpoint, impedes
transparent failover, permits denial-of-service attacks, and limits scalability.
This paper introduces a novel TCP-like transport protocol and a new
interface to replace sockets that together enable all state to be kept
on one endpoint, allowing the other endpoint, typically the server, to
operate without any per-connection state. Called Trickles,
this approach enables servers to
scale well with increasing numbers of clients, consume fewer
resources, and better resist denial-of-service attacks.
Measurements on a full implementation in Linux indicate that Trickles achieves
performance comparable to TCP/IP, interacts well with other flows, and
scales well. Trickles also enables qualitatively different kinds of networked
services. Services can be geographically replicated and contacted
through an anycast primitive for improved availability and
performance. Widely-deployed practices that currently have
client-observable side effects, such as periodic server reboots,
connection redirection, and failover, can be made transparent, and
perform well, under Trickles. The protocol is secure against
tampering and replay attacks, and the client interface is
backwards-compatible, requiring no changes to sockets-based client applications.
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