Systems such as software transactional memory and
some exception handling techniques use transactions. How-
ever, a typical limitation of such systems is that they do
not allow system calls within transactions. This is partic-
ularly true for system calls that interact with file systems,
devices, and the network. This paper describes systems ar-
chitectures that can be used to extend a transactional sys-
tem to allow network read/write system calls within a trans-
action. This is done by delaying the sending of network
bytes to a peer until a transaction is committed, and imple-
menting a rollback mechanism in case a transaction aborts.
Three different architectures, one transport layer and two
application layer, are proposed to incorporate this exten-
sion. The paper discusses the advantages and limitations
of each of these architectures. Prototypes of each of the
three architectures have been implemented. The paper de-
scribes the design and implementation of these prototypes,
and provides an extensive performance evaluation under
many different scenarios, including LAN environment, WAN
environment (PlanetLab), communication-intensive trans-
actions, and computation-intensive transactions.