(no subject)

This paper mainly focus on the research on Active network. Although
it has generated much debate, this paper has made substantial
progress towards providing a more flexible network layer while at the
same time addressing the performance and security concerns raised by
the presence of mobile code in the network.

This paper aims to redress the situation by reporting what the
authors have learned by designing, implementing and using the ANTS
active network toolkit. ANTS is well-suited to this purpose because
it is based on an aggressive "capsule"design that adds extensibility
at the IP packet level. The findings of this paper are based on
having implemented two large active network applications and numerous
smaller examples on top of ANTS, and on a comparison of the
properties of ANTS with Internet. The highlight of the findings are
in three areas that characterize a "pure" active network: the capsule
model of programmability; the accessibility of that model to all
users; and the applications that can be constructed in practice.

Profile measurements suggest that capsules can be a competitive
forwarding mechanism wherever software-based routers are viable. The
authors have partly succeeded in allowing each user the freedom to
control the handling of their packets within the network, and have
found capsules most useful for experimenting with and deploying new
services that are routing variants, such as multicast that make use
of network layer state.

This paper is much outdated I think. Based on my investigation, after
about 2002, there are few papers discussing active network. At the
time this paper was published, there were already a lot of critiques
as mentioned in the paper. It has generated much debate ini the
research community. Nowadays, no body continues to do this research,
because there is big problem in active networks, one of which may be
that it will generate much load to the network because it adds
intelligence to the network. No company uses active network in the
product, or does not enable this function, including Cisco. That may
be because of the downside of active network.
Received on Tue Nov 21 2006 - 23:10:17 EST