Transport layer support for highly-available network services

We advocate a transport layer protocol for highly available network services by means of transparent migration of the server endpoint of a live connection between cooperating servers that provide the same service. We propose a transport protocol that: (i) offers a better alternative than the simple retransmission to the same server, which may be suffering from overload or a DoS attack, may be down, or may not be easily reachable due to congestion; and (ii) decouples a given service from the unique/fixed identity of its provider. Our protocol can be viewed as an extension to the existing TCP, and compatible with it.