Transport Services (TAPS)

The Transport Services (TAPS) Working Group in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is developing a new abstraction for transport protocols. Through an Application Programming Interface (API) based on this abstraction, an application can communicate which Transport Services it needs instead of selecting a specific protocol. Then, the underlying Transport System selects a transport protocol, path (local network interfaces, i.e., access network), and endpoint (IP address resolved from domain name). Using TAPS, new transport protocols can be deployed without requiring further changes to applications.

As of February 2021, I co-chair the TAPS Working Group.

Moreover, I co-author the API draft and the Implementation draft, and I have co-authored RFC8922: A Survey of the Interaction Between Security Protocols and Transport Services.

Furthermore, I initiated a TAPS implementation called PyTAPS, which I am developing in close collaboration with Max Franke and Philipp Tiesel.

To get input from the Linux community, I presented the idea of TAPS at “All Systems Go” 2018, a foundational Linux conference.

Path-Aware Networking Research Group (PANRG)

The Path-Aware Networking Research Group (PANRG) in the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) discusses path-aware technologies, i.e., endpoints discovering the properties of paths they use for communication across an internetwork and reacting to these properties in a way that affects routing and/or data transfer.

In this research group, I co-author the draft A Vocabulary of Path Properties, which provides a generic terminology for paths and path properties.