A Novel Architecture for Resource Management in Active Networks Using a Directory Service

This paper presents a framework for resource management in highly dynamic active networks. The goal is to allocate and manage active node resources in an efficient way while ensuring effective utilization of network and supporting load balancing. The framework supports coexistence of active and non-active nodes and proposes a novel Directory Service (DS) architecture that can be used to discover the suitable active nodes in the Internet and for selecting best network path (end-to-end) and reserving the resources along the selected path. Intra-node and inter-node resource management are facilitated through the DS, while within an active node the framework implements the composite scheduling algorithm to schedule memory, CPU and bandwidth to solve the combined memory, CPU and bandwidth scheduling problems. In addition, a flexible active node Knowledge base system has been introduced in order to resolve the challenging problem of determining the CPU requirement of the incoming packets.