Thursday, December 12, 2013

Socket Intents: Leveraging Application Awareness for Multi-Access Connectivity

PresenterPhilipp S. Schmidt
Authors: Philipp S. Schmidt (TU Berlin / Telekom Innovation Laboratories), Theresa Enghardt (TU Berlin / Telekom Innovation Laboratories), Ramin Khalili (TU Berlin / Telekom Innovation Laboratories), Anja Feldmann (TU Berlin / Telekom Innovation Laboratories)

Many hosts (e.g., smartphones) have access to multiple networks with very different characteristics. The question is: how do you choose an interface for a particular application?

Currently, applications can only express the destination at the socket API; really, applications know more relevant information that the socket API lets them express. The authors present "socket intents," which allow the application to specify attributes like flow category, file size, sensitivity to timeliness, bitrate, duration, and resilience.

The socket API communicates these attributes to a policy module, which returns the appropriate interface to use for the connection.


Q: Cost is important to users --- how do you factor the cost of using a particular interface into your decision?
A: That's an important question --- it's difficult to quantify how much a faster download is "worth." We're still considering this.

Q: Have you thought at all about deterring flow attributes automatically in the case that the developer was too lazy to provide them?
A: We have not, but it would be an interesting future direction. 

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