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Speaker:
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Michael Welzl, University of Oslo, Norway
Date: Thursday, 30 November 2023, 17:15 h
Location: room BIN 2.A.01 at the Department of Informatics (IfI), Binzmühlestrasse 14, 8050 Zürich (information here)
Details about the format of the talk shall be checked always just ahead of a certain presentation date: (information here)
In recent years, the Internet's transport layer has undergone some significant changes. Notable examples of newly standardized Internet protocols are HTTP/3 (which uses QUIC instead of TCP) and Multi-Path TCP. Application developers should be able to benefit from the services that these new developments offer without having to rewrite their code. The Transport Services (TAPS) Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has just finished its work on a standard that makes this possible: TAPS replaces Berkeley sockets with a modern protocol-agnostic API, and it gives advice on how mechanisms underneath it can suitably engage and control network protocols based on application requirements.
One implementation of a TAPS system is particularly noteworthy: Apple's Network.framework. As one of the major contributors to the TAPS Working Group, Apple has been recommending this API to all their application developers and has been using it for its own applications since 2018 (beta for iOS 12 and macOS Mojave). Since 2022, an application using this API may benefit from QUIC without even noticing that it does not operate over TCP anymore.
This talk will give an overview of these new developments and discuss their implications. Besides providing more flexibility in the Operating System and the network, the richer service set of TAPS changes how we should think of networking, even when using higher-layer APIs (pub/sub middleware, REST, RPC, ..). This can create new opportunities for research on Distributed Systems and networked applications in general.
Prof. Dr. Michael Welzl is a full professor in the Department of Informatics of the University of Oslo since 2009. He received his PhD (with distinction) and his habilitation from the University of Darmstadt, Germany in 2002 and 2007, respectively, after receiving his MSc in Telekooperation at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria. Michael has been active in the IETF and IRTF for many years, e.g., by chairing the Internet Congestion Control Research Group (ICCRG) for 11 years, leading the effort to form the Transport Services (TAPS) Working Group, and authoring 13 RFCs. He has also participated in several European research projects in roles such as coordinator and technical manager. His research interests include transport protocols and network architectures, with a focus on the Internet and on performance as well as energy efficiency.
