Legacy Systems in Radically New Environments

Ubiquitously networked mobile devices are already a reality: PDAs with WLAN support, Internet flat rates on mobile phones, and ad-hoc networks with future systems. In such highly dynamic and diverse environments, the strictly layered TCP/IP protocol stack has long reached its limits and cannot provide vertical handovers, disconnected operation, not to mention on-the-fly installation and configuration of new protocols or services. Worse, each device comes with its own specialized or modified applications instead of re-using well-known and trusted standard solutions. Finally, users cannot enjoy seamless wired, wireless, or disconnected operation but are constantly bothered with the artifacts of network transitions. Due to different technologies or access restrictions, each network requires its own setup and configuration – even additional software like VPN support.

Research Outline of Adapt

The Adapt project addresses these problems by generalizing protocol implementations into individual components with uniform interfaces. This modularization provides two key benefits:

1. Components (protocols) can be combined arbitrarily at the software level. Thus, components are independent of such fixed and inflexible conventions as protocol layers or operating system structures. Such conventions are increasingly pushed to their limits, in particular in mobile communication, where e.g., handovers and tunneling interrupt connectivity and require user interaction. Modularization also permits to deploy new protocols dynamically and automatically.
2. Adapt explicitely separates the implementation of components from their semantics. Consequently, protocols, protocol extensions, tunnels, etc. are uniformly and freely integrated into application-specific communication stacks. This integration is guided by a wide range of hard requirements and soft composition factors from the network, runtime, application, and user environment.

Such a generalized notion of a networking functionality provides several benefits:

A Powerful Protocol Architecture

Automated On-demand Instantiation and Configuration

Support for Legacy Systems and Applications

Project Details

• Funding Organization: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG (German Research Foundation)
• Duration: 2 years