Review: Active Network Vision and Reality: Lessons from a Capsule-based System

Review: Active Network Vision and Reality: Lessons from a Capsule-
based System

Reviewer: Di Niu

The author has reported substantial progress towards active networks
in this paper through presenting experience using the ANTS active
network toolkit. It is claimed that this work has made important
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 cod in the network. Three aspects of a "pure"
active network have been considered in the paper: the capsule model
of programmability; the accessibility of that model to all users; and
the applications that can be constructed in practice.

First, profile measurements suggest that capsules can be a
competitive forwarding mechanism wherever software-based routers are
viable. To implement capsules efficiently, the authors haev replaced
a naive code carrying scheme with one in which code is carried by
reference and so depends on demand loading and traffic patterns for
which caching is effective. Second, the paper has partly succeeded in
allowing each user the freedom to control the handling of their
packets within the network. However, it is still an open problem to
prevent misbehaving programs from monopolizing resources across a
group of nodes. Third, as far as applications are concerned, it is
found that capsules are most useful fro experimenting with and
deploying new services that a rerouting variants, such as multicast.

The paper is largely a subsequent work of its reference [41].
Although great progress has been made towards the active networks
originally envisioned in [41], there is still a long way to go before
a "pure" active network can be achieved. However, the paper proposes
the fundamental insight of making network elements programmable,
which is quite important for the future design of the Internet.
Received on Thu Nov 23 2006 - 11:00:46 EST