Using Web10G for Service and Network Diversity Exploitation and Failure Recovery

Diversity and redundancy are key properties at the heart of the Internet performance and reliability. However, traditional network and transport interfaces prevent upper layers from directly exploiting them. In order to allow an immediate, ready-to-use, exploitation of diversity and redundancy, we intro- duced a way of supporting multi-path and multi-server logical connections among a client and a service. The proposal is based on a programming pattern and a run-time support implemented using the Web10G Linux kernel patch, which allows user level access to the kernel TCP variables and performance measures characterizing each TCP connection. The resulting framework allows applications to explore network and service diversity for increased performance and fault recovery experiments