Revisiting the network stack in CAF

Abstract

Applications increasingly demand distribution across the global Internet. The Actor model of computation has been wisely designed to abstract communication between actors and hence remains transparent w.r.t. distribution. Performance, security, and deployment considerations, however, make it difficult to define a specific communication transport that should be hardcoded into an actor framework. It is rather desirable to design appropriate transport abstractions, which allow for flexible choices and configurations of transport functions on the Internet. In this paper, we report about our ongoing work of redesigning, implementing, and evaluating a network stack that abstracts transport for the C++ Actor Framework (CAF). The stack allows for the exchanging of transport protocols and adds configuration options as well as compositions of protocols. First comparisons of TCP versus UDP with configurable reliability options are provided, as well as an early evaluation of its performance.