article

Structured streams: a new transport abstraction

Author:

Bryan FordAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Volume 37, Issue 4

Pages 361 - 372

https://doi.org/10.1145/1282427.1282421

Published: 27 August 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Internet applications currently have a choice between stream and datagram transport abstractions. Datagrams efficiently support small transactions and streams are suited for long-running conversations, but neither abstraction adequately supports applications like HTTP that exhibit a mixture of transaction sizes, or applications like FTP and SIP that use multiple transport instances. Structured Stream Transport (SST) enhances the traditional stream abstraction with a hierarchical hereditary structure, allowing applications to create lightweight child streams from any existing stream. Unlike TCP streams, these lightweight streams incur neither 3-way handshaking delays on startup nor TIME-WAIT periods on close. Each stream offers independent data transfer and flow control, allowing different transactions to proceed in parallel without head-of-line blocking, but all streams share one congestion control context. SST supports both reliable and best-effort delivery in a way that semantically unifies datagrams with streams and solves the classic "large datagram" problem, where a datagram's loss probability increases exponentially with fragment count. Finally, an application can prioritize its streams relative to each other and adjust priorities dynamically through out-of-band signaling. A user-space prototype shows that SST is TCP-friendly to within 2%, and performs comparably to a user-space TCP and to within 10% of kernel TCP on a WiFi network.

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Index Terms

Structured streams: a new transport abstraction
1. General and reference
  1. Document types
    1. Computing standards, RFCs and guidelines
2. Networks
  1. Network protocols

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review

ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review Volume 37, Issue 4

October 2007

420 pages

ISSN:0146-4833

DOI:10.1145/1282427

Issue’s Table of Contents

SIGCOMM '07: Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
August 2007
432 pages
ISBN:9781595937131
DOI:10.1145/1282380
General Chairs:
Jun Murai
Keio University, Japan
,
Kenjiro Cho
IIJ, Japan

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 27 August 2007

Published in SIGCOMM-CCR Volume 37, Issue 4

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https://doi.org/10.1109/IWQoS61813.2024.10682948
Murthy AAsghar MTu W(2021) Towards a data‐driven framework for optimizing security‐efficiency tradeoff in QUIC SECURITY AND PRIVACY10.1002/spy2.1845:1Online publication date: 11-Aug-2021
https://doi.org/10.1002/spy2.184
Cao XZhao SZhang Y(2019)0-RTT Attack and Defense of QUIC Protocol2019 IEEE Globecom Workshops (GC Wkshps)10.1109/GCWkshps45667.2019.9024637(1-6)Online publication date: Dec-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/GCWkshps45667.2019.9024637
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Pooya SLu PMacGregor M(2012)Structured Message Transport2012 IEEE 31st International Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC)10.1109/PCCC.2012.6407651(432-439)Online publication date: Dec-2012
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Leng CTerpstra WLehn MRehner RBuchmann A(2012)All-Weather Transport EssentialsIEEE Internet Computing10.1109/MIC.2012.12116:6(30-39)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2012
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