PLANet: An Active Internetwork

We present PLANet: an active network architecture and implementation. In addition to a standard suite of Internet-like services, PLANet has two key programmability features: 1. all packets contain programs 2. router functionality may be extended dynamically Packet programs are written in our special purpose programming language PLAN, the Packet Language for Active Networks, while dynamic router extensions are written in OCaml, a dialect of ML. Currently, PLANet routers run as byte-code-interpreted Linux userspace applications, and support Ethernet and IP as link layers. PLANet achieves respectable performance on standard networking operations: on 300 MHz Pentium-II’s attached to 100 Mbps Ethernet, PLANet can route 48 Mbps and switch over 5000 packets per second. We demonstrate the utility of PLANet’s activeness by showing experimentally how it can nontrivially improve application and aggregate network performance in congested conditions.