Towards an Active Network Architecture

  • Authors:
  • David L. Tennenhouse;David J. Wetherall

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • DANCE '02 Proceedings of the 2002 DARPA Active Networks Conference and Exposition
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Active networks allow their users to inject customized programs into the nodes of the network. An extreme case, in which we are most interested, replaces packets with "capsules" - program fragments that are executed at each network router/switch they traverse.Active architectures permit a massive increase in the sophistication of the computation that is performedwithin the network.They will enable new applications,especially those based on application-specific multicast,information fusion, and other services that leveragenetwork-based computation and storage.Furthermore,they will accelerate the pace of innovation bydecoupling network services from the underlyinghardware and allowing new services to be loaded intothe infrastructure on demand.In this paper, we describe our vision of an activenetwork architecture, outline our approach to its design,and survey the technologies that can be brought to bearon its implementation.We propose that the researchcommunity mount a joint effort to develop and deploy awide area ActiveNet.