MTCL: A Multi-transport Communication Library

To pave the way toward adopting the Compute Continuum paradigm, there is the need to support highly distributed heterogeneous application workflows that require the simultaneous use of multiple communication protocols in different parts of the application. In this work, we present for the first time the MTCL C++ communication library. It aims to abstract multiple transport protocols (e.g., MQTT, MPI, TCP) and related implementations under a single connection-oriented API, offering point-to-point and collective communication patterns to the programmers. We discuss the main design choices and preliminary performance results measured using the OSU micro-benchmarks. Finally, through a simple Federated Learning application, we showcase the flexibility of the MTCL library.