Alex Yiu-Man Chan
mailto:alexchan@cisco.com
Ricky Ho
mailto:riho@cisco.com
This paper presents Cisco's view on how XML processing is done in the network.
With increasing XML traffic in the network, there is a need for networking systems to process the inherently verbose content more efficiently. There are generally several dimensions that optimizations can happen:
The following are a number of requirements that we have identified for the solution:
Our network system works in any application domain and handles all kinds of traffic. The XML documents would be mostly for business transactions that can go from a few kilobytes to tens of kilobytes.
With an efficient solution to represent and process XML traffic, it would be possible to enable a new breed of network-based applications that directly sit on the data path, such as:
As a whole, the network would have the intelligence to efficiently process XML in real-time, allowing the applications to focus on the business logic.
Our requirements can possibly be satisfied by using gzip on raw XML. This is the current implementation and it is a satisfactory solution. However, any approach that can further reduce latency from computation and transmission would be very useful.
We see a strong need for more efficient processing and transmission of XML documents to realize the vision of the intelligent network. The network would then be much more application-aware or application-oriented.