Efficient Implementation of Dynamic Protocol Stacks

Network programming is widely understood as programming strictly defined socket interfaces. Only some frameworks have made a step towards real network programming by decomposing networking functionality into small modular blocks that can be assembled in a flexible manner. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of accommodating 3 partially conflicting objectives: (i) high flexibility for network programmers, (ii) re-configuration of the network stack at runtime, and (iii) high packet forwarding rates. First experiences with a prototype implementation in Linux suggest little performance overhead compared to the standard Linux protocol stack.