An Architecture for Internet Data Transfer

Initially when i was reading this paper, since for this whole semester we've been reading papers on the network architecture, i finally realized that this was not a paper on the architecture of the internet, but more like overlay networks where services are implemented on top of the existing network for convenience. Several of his points seemed very appealing, including the fact that different applications that use or send the same data could potentially cache because they were using the same transfer service, thus save in time to transmit or obtain data.

THe idea of seperating data transfer and negotiation of data certainly is not new. FTP is the perfect example of a protocol which uses one connection for negotiation and another connection for data transfer. The difference here is that this is provides a general interface for use for all the applications instead of merely ftp. The implementation uses C++ and hooks into network transfer libraries and create callbacks when transferring data. The interface approach is interesting, but i'm just wondering about how applicable this is to most applications on the internet, since there are already a lot of existing services used for data transfer.