Transport Layer Support for Highly-Available Network Services

We advocate a transport layer protocol for highly available network services using transparent migration of the server endpoint of a live connection between operating servers. We propose a client-initiated migration mechanism, integrated into a migration architecture that uniformly addresses various types of events that negatively impact the quality of service to clients. In the resulting architecture, the migration mechanism is independent and decoupled from any migration policies. In our system connection migration, can be used to improve performance as perceived by the client, for server load balancing, to survive server failures et. We examine and address challenges posed by the transfer of connection state needed for migration to both the OS and the application layer.Technical report DCS-TR-42