Cross-Layer Coordination : Let ’ s Talk About Intentions

To evolve a network beyond a stupid bitpipe, the network needs information about the applications’ intentions and communication preferences. We give an brief overview about our earlier work, Socket Intents, that augments the standard BSD socket interface to enable the application to express what it knows about its communication patterns and preferences. This information can then be used by our proactive policies to choose the appropriate interface, tune the network parameters, or even combine multiple interfaces. We also give an outlook how similar mechanism can be used in other parts of the network to exploit synergies between the network layers without violating the layering.