PARC HTTP-NG: Transport Issues

We need lightweight efficient transport for conveying HTTP requests and responses. It must support reliable message transport, message fragmentation (the ability to send and receive a whole message as a series of partial messages), and congestion control as in TCP/IP. It must be able to export an API very similar to the BSD socket interface. If implemented on top of TCP/IP, or any other reliable byte-stream protocol, it must be able to support multiple independent channels or sessions over a single TCP/IP connection, and should be bi-directional (no difference between receiving and originating ends of the TCP/IP connection). We hope to be able to implement the MUX over TCP/IP, but the BSD sockets API may make it too inefficient, and the MUX layer may have to be implemented on top of IP (i.e., UDP/IP).

The work is centered at the World Wide Web Consortium (see http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/MUX).

TBD