Towards an API for the path-aware internet

Abstract

Path-aware networking (PAN) architectures promise to support practical multipath communication with increased availability and to accommodate heterogeneous communication requirements. However, at a time when most applications merely rely on "HTTP(S) as a Substrate" for their networking requirements, the quick adoption and effective use of such new communication capabilities at the application level is challenged from a deployment standpoint. This raises the question of how to create an adequate application programming interface for a path-aware Internet that comes with measurable improvements in network communication. Using concepts from current IETF-IRTF in-progress documents, our work reasons about the demands and implications of pathaware application programming, sketches a possible approach and provides an early glimpse of our practical implementation of a suitably abstract interface to a next-generation networking stack.