the extensibility and evolution of network services and protocols had become a major research issue in recent years. The 'programmable' and 'active' network paradigms have been trying to solve the problems emanating from the immutable organization of network software layers by allowing arbitrary custom codes to be embedded inside network layers. In this work, we propose a new approach for building extensible network systems to support cross-layer optimization. The fundamental idea is to perform a simple, light-weight meta-engineering on the classical OSI protocols' organization to make it interactive and transparent. The protocols become (interactive) since they can provide event notification to service subscribers, and they become (transparent) since they also allow controlled access to their state information. Actual protocol extensions (or modifications) can then be performed at the application space by what we call Transientware Modules. This organization p...
Javed I. Khan, Raid Zaghal