Anypoint Communication Protocol

Summary form only given. We are developing the Anypoint Communication Protocol (ACP). ACP clients establish connections to abstract services, represented at the network edge by Anypoint intermediaries. The intermediary is an intelligent network switch that acts as an extension of the service; it encapsulates a service-specific policy for distributing requests among servers in the active set for each service. The switch routes incoming requests on each ACP connection to any active server at the discretion of the service routing policy, hence the name "Anypoint". The Anypoint abstraction and ACP protocol enable virtualization using intermediaries for a general class of wide-area network services based on request/response communication over persistent transport connections. Potential applications include scalable IP-based network storage protocols and next-generation Web services.