An Approach for Transferring an End-to-End Transport Service into a Functional Building Block Structure

Current network stacks based on the classic OSI layered reference model are restricted and inflexible, which makes the addition and deployment of new features difficult. Operating systems offer an interface for the Transport Layer functionalities to applications. The usage of this interface is very widespread, making it useful to maintain this interface. However, the layered structure should be replaced. In this paper, we propose our approach for breaking up the functionalities of the OSI Transport Layer into the concept so called functional building blocks. Each functional building block provides a particular service, which – in interaction with the other functional building blocks – is able to provide a service similar to the classic OSI Transport Layer. The concept allows for easy removal, replacement or addition of existing and new functional building blocks to adapt the service to state-of-the-art and future requirements, particularly including multi-path transport and QoS.