TESLA: A Transparent, Extensible Session-Layer Architecture for End-to-end Network Services

Session-layer services for enhancing functionality and improving network performance are gaining in importance in the Internet. Examples of such services include connection multiplexing, congestion state sharing, application-level routing, mobility/migration support, and encryption. This paper describes TESLA, a transparent and extensible framework allowing session-layer services to be developed using a high-level flow-based abstraction. TESLA services can be deployed transparently using dynamic library interposition and can be composed by chaining event handlers in a graph structure. We show how TESLA can be used to implement several session-layer services including encryption, SOCKS, application-controlled routing, flow migration, and traffic rate shaping, all with acceptably low performance degradation.