EDTS: An Extensible Data Transmission Service for the Internet

With the prevalence of the Internet as well as the ever-growing data volume, both applications and users are raising more and more requirements on data transmission service. However, the TCP/IP protocol suite, which forms the basis for applications to exchange data via the Internet, has inherent difficulties in meeting these requirements, for the application layer is tightly coupled with the transport layer and it is hard to integrate common data processing logic with applications. And what's more, the TCP/IP protocol suite only provides applications with end-to-end, single path data transfer service and as a result, the available redundant physical resources on the Internet are not fully utilized. To deal with these problems, we devised an extensible data transmission service (EDTS) that decouples the applications from the transport layer and can integrate common end-to-end data processing logic into applications. Based on EDTS, we designed and implemented two mechanisms, namely MultiTCP and MultiPath to speed up data transfer over the Internet for large files, where MultiTCP can build multiple TCP connections between a receiver and a sender by using different network adapters of them and MultiPath can build multiple virtual connections between them through the help of intermediate nodes. Experimental results show that, with only a little overhead, EDTS is able to provide applications with highly flexible and extensible data transmission functions. In our settings, MultiTCP can improve data transfer speed by 1.64 times at least and MultiPath can improve the speed by 1.43-1.78 times.