Taking Advantage of Multihoming with Session Layer Striping

Striping is a resource aggregation technique that can improve application performance for a multihomed host by utilizing multiple interfaces. In this position paper, we argue in favor of decoupling striping primitives from all of the traditional layers of the networking protocol stack, and instead resurrecting the session layer for striping. Session layer striping indeed allows applications to take advantage of multihoming, while avoiding most of the deployability issues traditionally linked with modifiying application layer code. We illustrate our argument with a strawman architecture for a session layer striping protocol, and sketch how such a protocol could be implemented.