ATP: autonomous transport protocol

In this paper we present the design of the autonomous transport protocol (ATP). The basic service provided by the ATP is to maintain a reliable transport connection between two endpoints, identified by content identifiers, independent of their physical locations. Autonomy allows dynamic endpoints relocation on different hosts without disrupting the transport connection between them. The ATP depends on the existence of an underlying enhanced content-based network to achieve its goals. Data is transferred by a combination of active and passive operations, where the ATP layer of a node can decide whether to actively push the data to the destination or to passively wait for the destination endpoint to pull the data. The decision to use either the active mode or the passive mode can be taken by a local policy on the node running the ATP.