The virtual network system

Abstract

A popular technology area quickly gains competing solutions to solve the same goal. Examples include file systems and storage, and communication technologies. All competing solutions typically introduce their own specific functionality, programming models and APIs; this generally forces application programmers to choose a specific solution and build the application for it. There exists exceptions to this unfortunate state of affairs, e.g., Linux includes the Virtual File System (VFS) to decouple applications from specific local storage devices. A similar functionality is provided by the Network File System (NFS), i.e., it decouples the client from the storage server. The communication technologies do not have a similar solution: each technology is different and has its own programming model and API. In this paper we introduce the Virtual Network System (VNS) that combines the concepts of VFS and NFS for communication technologies. Our solution is a middleware that enables a unified API for applications to use any communication technology, local or remote. We describe our architecture and discuss our current implementation that enables communication over IP and VHF radio.