Autonomic configuration of dynamic protocol stacks

Abstract

The Internet architecture works well for a wide variety of communication scenarios. However, communication in constrained environments with embedded and/or mobile devices requires specialized communication protocols. Additionally, network characteristics often vary in those scenarios, which makes it difficult for a static set of protocols to provide the required functionality. Therefore, we propose a self-aware configuration method for dynamic protocol stacks that allows for the autonomic configuration of individual protocols into a protocol stack. This adaptation happens at run-time and might be triggered by policy changes or by changing network conditions. We demonstrate the efficiency of our self-aware architecture for a networking scenario where the link quality changes over time. In contrast to a static reliable protocol stack we can reduce the communication overhead in terms of sent packets by 28% for a given scenario.