Design and Evaluation of a Socket Emulator for Publish/Subscribe Networks

Abstract

Abstract-In order for a Future Internet architecture to be globally deployed, it must ensure that existing applications will continue to operate efficiently on top of it. As part of the Publish Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm (PSIRP) project, we have explored various options for making endpoint centric applications based on the Sockets Application Programming Interface (API) compatible with the information centric PSIRP prototype implementation. We developed an emulator that mediates between the client/server socket calls and the publish/subscribe PSIRP calls, transforming the exchange of packets to distribution of publications. To assess the overhead of our emulator, we measure the execution time of a simple file transfer application in native socket mode, in emulated socket mode and in native publish/subscribe mode.

Demonstrating usage diversity over an information-centric network

“…We demonstrate the backwards compatibility of our system with a Socket API emulator [7]: a software library that operates on top of our network node prototype and provides the well-known socket abstraction to applications by mapping send/receive socket calls to pub/sub primitives. To receive packets on a socket (UDP or TCP) with address IP:port, the emulator subscribes to the item with identifier /proto/IP/port, where proto is UDP or TCP.…”

P/S sockets

“…Finally, an approach almost "dual" to our proposal is presented in [17] where UDP and TCP sockets are emulated on top of P/S technology. In this case, the assumption is that P/S is the core networking technology on top of which one develops support for the legacy datagram and reliable stream communication services.…”