A Negotiation-Based Scheme for Interconnecting Heterogeneous Networks With Enhanced Services

Abstract

Although the TCP/IP protocols have made great contributions to the development of the Internet, there is a consensus that the Internet needs improvement to solve the address space exhausted, content-oriented service, and so on. The academic community has proposed lots of valuable but heterogeneous network protocols, which provide better network services but split the Internet. To connect these heterogeneous networks, many middleboxes (e.g.,NAT and Tunnel) are deployed on the Internet, but these middleboxes mask the communication peers and shield various network services that are provided by these heterogeneous networks. In this article, we propose the HNN (heterogeneous networks negotiation), which provides transparent end-to-end communication and connects heterogeneous networks stateless in the data plane. What's more, HNN enables the host to perceive the available network service provided by heterogeneous networks and helps the host structure appropriate packet header and packet forwarding path to take advantage of these heterogeneous network services. We implement and evaluate an HNN prototype with commodity Barefoot Tofino programmable switch S9180-32X. The evaluation results demonstrate that HNN introduces little processing time overhead (no more than 3%) compared to well-known heterogeneous connectivity techniques (i.e.,NAT and Tunnel) and allows hosts to utilize heterogeneous network services.