Stack Composition for SILO Architecture

Abstract

SILO is a new internetworking architecture that represents a significant departure from current philosophy and practice. The architecture consists of building blocks of fine-grain functionality, explicit support for combining elemental blocks to accomplish highly configurable complex communication tasks, and control elements to facilitate (what is currently referred to as) cross-layer interactions. It takes a holistic view of network design, allowing applications to work synergistically with the network architecture and physical layers so as to meet the application's needs within resource availability constraints. The SILO research advocates a non-layered architecture based on silos of services assembled on demand and specific to an application and network environment. With the goal to facilitate what in today's layered architecture is referred to as 'cross-laye' interactions, in a manner that meets the exact user requirements and optimizes performance, the main focus of this research work is on developing mechanisms to optimize the construction of SILOs (stack of services) in a manner that takes into account service specific constraints, current network conditions and user policies.