Network interfaces flying over IP networks

Abstract

We propose a novel method to export both interface control and data planes across different hosts, effectively enabling hardware specific control of network interfaces over the Internet, or from a host to its virtualized guests. Our solution is a major step towards distributed environments of heterogeneous communication systems, particularly relevant in the scope of custom system composition, remote development and testing, and is especially relevant when considering embedded or geographically constrained devices. Results obtained by our prototype implementation validate the effectiveness of the solution. We present a preliminary characterization of its impact, when considering traffic generation applications, when applied over an IEEE 802.11g communication medium.