Transparent and Dynamic Deployment of Lightweight Transport Protocols

The adoption of new Transport protocols on the Internet remains a critical challenge and their effective deployment is very slow. Till now, despite its known limitations and the plethora of existing alternatives like QUIC or DCTCP, almost 90% of applications transmissions are based on TCP. From this observation, we assert that redirecting TCP-connection to another Transport protocol may accelerate the deployment and the adoption of any new Transport protocols in the Internet. The selected Transport protocol towards which the redirection is performed may either already exist in the OS or dynamically be deployed on it. Recently introduced in the Linux kernel, eBPF technology provides the abilities to insert at runtime functionalities in the kernel from userspace programs. In this paper, we propose a preliminary design of a eBPF-based framework to perform our approach. Following this design, we implement a prototype that safely (1) perform transparent redirection of TCP connections either to the OS native UDP or to UDP-Lite; the later one is (2) dynamically deployed as eBPF programs. This first prototype, developed on Linux 5.0, has the worth to demonstrate our concept but suffer from performances issues to which we formulate some solutions and open up the associated research questions. Nevertheless, we believe that our approach may lead to innovation at the Internet Transport layer.