ITR: Internet Flows as First-Class Values: Support for Dynamic, Flexible Internet Services

互联网最近的转变--从一个纯粹的尽力传输媒介转变为开放的通信和计算基础设施--需要开发健壮的抽象概念，以便按照广泛接受的正确性标准来支持不断增加的应用程序数量，这些标准确保了对互联网资源的可验证的安全、公平、安全和有效的访问。编写新的互联网应用程序和服务的问题与大约30年前困扰编程系统的组织原则的缺乏相同。研究人员认为，认识到网络流是围绕其组织互联网编程系统的中心抽象，这可能是组织的关键原则。具体地说，为了在现有互联网基础设施的约束下快速试验和部署广泛的新服务，有必要采用更强大的模型来命名、创建、合成、共享和处理互联网流。为此，研究人员将互联网流提升为一流价值，即根据需要直接访问、作用和编程的实体。因此，开发因特网应用或服务(例如，CDN代理或终端系统多播)的任务变成了编写适当的程序来操纵因特网流(以及与该应用相关的其他第一类值)的任务。为了能够指定和编译操纵互联网流量的程序，特别是特定于应用的互联网协议，有必要进行包括两个计算机科学学科的基础研究：网络系统和编程语言。需要对网络系统进行基础研究，以开发支持要呈现给协议程序员的各种抽象的核心服务。需要在编程语言方面进行基础研究，以开发能够表达协议属性和验证协议某些安全属性的原语和形式化。建议的工作将集中在以下具体领域：(1)支持不同程度的可靠性、拥塞管理和及时性的传输服务，(2)支持不同程度的移动性和组播的路由服务，(3)支持不同程度的服务质量和安全性的端到端服务，(4)支持Internet服务灵活组合的命名机制，以及(5)支持高效和安全的面向流的编程的类型推理。为了实现上述目标，拟议的研究将主要由网络系统和编程语言方面的现有研究小组的成员进行合作。拟议工作的一个关键组成部分是实现和原型制作。为此目的，将通过实施NetB边编程环境来展示互联网流量是一流价值的范例的效用。NetBch是一种编程环境，其中将支持一组核心的网络流量类型和操作，以及用于处理网络流量类型的类型检查和类型推理系统。实现这些目标将超越目前旨在支持互联网增长的零碎尝试。研究人员认为，拟议的努力将提高网络软件开发环境的灵活性、可靠性、安全性和安全性，从而产生类似于传统编程语言研究产生的软件开发人员更高生产率的经济效益。为追求这些雄心勃勃的目标而组建的研究小组在编程语言和互联网技术的研究方面做出了国家公认的重大贡献，并在软件开发和技术转让方面拥有既定的记录。波士顿大学致力于通过大量的财政和基础设施承诺来支持这个团队，以补充和利用从NSF寻求的支持。

The recent metamorphosis of the Internet-from a mere best-effort transport medium to an open communication and computation infrastructure necessitates the development of robust abstractions that facilitate its use to support a constantly increasing number of applications, in compliance with widely-accepted correctness standards that ensure a verifiably safe, fair, secure, and efficient access of Internet resources.Programming new Internet applications and services suffers from the same lack of organizing principles that afflicted programming systems some thirty years ago. The researchers believe that recognizing network flows as the central abstraction around which to organize a programming system for the Internet is perhaps the key organizing principle. Speciffically, to rapidly experiment with and deploy a wide range of new services within the existing constraints of the Internet infrastructure, it is necessary to adopt a more powerful model for the naming, creation, composition, sharing, and processing of Internet flows.Towards this goal the researchers promote Internet flows to first-class values, i.e., entities that are directly accessed, acted on and programmed according to needs. As a consequence, the task of developing an Internet application or service (e.g., a CDN broker or an end-system multicast) becomes the task of writing an appropriate program to manipulate Internet flows (along with other first-class values relevant to the application). To enable the speciffication and compilation of programs manipulating Internet flows, in particular application-specific Internet protocols, it is necessary to conduct basic research that encompasses two computer science disciplines: Networking Systems and programming Languages. Basic research in networking systems is needed to develop the core services that support the various abstractions to be presented to protocol programmers. Basic research in programming languages is needed to develop the primitives and formalisms that enable the expression of protocol properties and the verification of certain safety properties of the protocol.The proposed work will focus on the following specific areas: (1) Transport Services to support various degrees of reliability, congestion management, and timeliness, (2) Routing Services to support various degrees of mobility and multicasting, (3) End-to-End Services to support various degrees of QoS and security, (4) Naming mechanisms to support flexible composition of Internet services, and (5) Type inference to support efficient and safe flow-oriented programming.Towards the goals outlined above, the proposed research will be a collaborative effort carried primarily by members of established research groups in Networking Systems and in Programming Languages.A key component of the proposed work is implementation and prototyping. To that end, the utility of a paradigm in which Internet flows are first-class values will be demonstrated by implementing NetBench a programming environment in which a core set of network flow types and operations will be supported, along with a type-checking and type-inference system to handle types of network flows.The pursuit of the research goals outlined in this proposal is timely. Achieving these goals will leapfrog current piecemeal attempts aiming at supporting Internet growth. The researchers believe that the proposed effort will improve the flexibility, reliability, safety, and security of network software development environments, leading to economic efficiencies similar to the higher productivity of software developers arising from traditional programming language research. The research team assembled to pursue these ambitious goals has made significant, nationally-recognized contributions to research in Programming Languages and Internet Technologies and has an established record in software development and technology transfer. Boston University is committed to supporting this team through substantial financial and infrastructural commitments that complement and leverage the support sought from NSF.