Virtual Active Networks

This proposal describes the Virtual Active Network (VAN) Architecture. A VAN is a dynamically constructed virtual network that provides application specific services, such as web caching, multicasting, and transcoding, etc. The goal of a VAN is to enable large scale network applications to control and configure network topology and resources to best support their needs. The key results of this thesis are mechanisms to realize such enabling technology. In particular, the VAN architecture provides: (1) abstractions for applications to specify a VAN; algorithm to map the VAN virtual topol-ogy to physical topology; protocols to acquire necessary resources to support the VAN services. (2) algorithm and protocol to resolve deadlock among competitions for shared node and link resources. (3) algorithm and protocol to adapt to physical network failure in order to preserve VAN service semantics.