About NEAT

NEAT is a European research project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement no. 644334.

NEAT will provide a new approach enabling developers to specify an application’s requirements in terms of rate, delay, reliability, cost, etc. This will allow NEAT to choose, or help choose, the best communication service. By separating services offered to applications from the underlying protocols and OS features, NEAT will enable automatic and transparent choice of the best transport options available. As network technologies and protocols continue to evolve, NEAT-enabled applications will immediately be able to take advantage of new functions to reduce web page download times, make teleconferences more responsive or reduce the cost of downloading a software update, getting whatever the application needs.

Project title

A New, Evolutive API and Transport-Layer Architecture for the Internet

Duration

March 2015 – April 2018

Web site

https://www.neat-project.org

Context and motivation

The Internet’s transport-layer architecture is, in some aspects, still dependent on developments dating from the 1980’s. Modern online applications need a more flexible transport architecture to rest upon, given the substantial changes that the usage of the Internet has undergone in the past decades. The new reality includes mobile users and no longer shows a clear separation between data communication and telecommunication services.

Smartphones and tablets can run an extensive variety of Internet applications, connected via networks such as WiFi and LTE; terminals such as laptops and desktop PCs add wired connections to the above mix of wireless network technologies. Besides, each application has its own requirements for how it wishes its data to be carried over the Internet. The communication needs of a sensor application differ from those of web browsing or remote conferencing applications. This diversity of needs and technologies currently requires application developers to consider the different networks their application may run on, and how to tune transport and network parameters for those networks – not an easy task.

The problem above is compounded by the fact that the current transport architecture of the Internet – as embodied by common Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) – exposes communication protocols to applications instead of services, and ties applications to a priori choices.

Solution

The NEAT Transport System is being designed to take care of:

• Offering an enhanced API between applications and the transport layer, so that it exposes transport services to applications.
• Implementing transport services in a best-effort manner, based on the protocols and functions that are available end-to-end along a network path.
• Providing transparent support for: (a) dealing with middleboxes; (b) discovering and leveraging end-to-end features; (c) interacting with the network for a better application experience.
• Enabling user-space protocol stacks.

Such features will allow the NEAT System to: (a) decouple applications from a priori choices of underlying protocols and technologies; (b) support incremental evolution and deployment of new transports; (c) relieve applications from the burden of implementing common mechanisms, and avoid “reinventing the wheel”.

Expected impact

NEAT will work towards an open-source reference implementation of the transport system that realises its core functionalities. Also, NEAT’s transport system is targeted for inclusion in future releases of the open-source Firefox Mobile web browser.

Building an in-house transport system can yield the best performance for applications that have special network requirements, and this is the path taken by a few industry giants. However, this path cannot be afforded by most software developers and is fraught with many technical hurdles.  By contributing to a free open-source transport system with a large set of functions for efficient communication, NEAT will contribute to a more level playing field for innovative small companies, from which novel Internet applications often come. NEAT will help to make it easier for European software developers to write and deploy applications that efficiently communicate across the Internet, and will enable innovations across the Internet protocol stack.

Moreover, to facilitate the broad adoption of NEAT outcomes, the project consortium is promoting its results for standardisation at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), in relevant working groups such as the Transport Services Working Group (TAPS) and the Transport Area Working Group (TSVWG).