A User-level Socket Layer over Multiple Physical Network Interfaces

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of an UDP-based socket that utilizes multiple network interface units connected through one or more networks. The socket is a middleware layer that provides abstract network APIs to hide low-level technical details from users. Parallel message fragmentation and reconstruction techniques and a reliable UDP-based protocol are introduced. The proposed socket layer transparently provides an expandable high bandwidth solution, fault tolerance, and load balancing for transmitting large messages over multiple networks. A prototype socket based on this model, called MuniSocket (Multiple Network Interface Socket), has been implemented and evaluated.