A Scalable Architecture for Active Networks

This paper explores the network-level issues that deal with the organization, interaction, and deployment of active routers in a network. We have identified and answered four sets of questions: (i) Where should active routers be placed in the network? What is the network organization of active routers that achieves a good trade-off between scalability and flexibility? (ii) If all routers in the network are not active, then how can we abstract the state of the “non-active” portion of the network for services that reside in active routers? (iii) How do active routers discover and communicate with, other active routers? What is the infrastructure for the management, discovery, and communication of active routers? (iv) How do users discover the available (third party) active services in the network? What is the infrastructure for the dissemination, discovery, and composition of active services? We present a network organization of active routers and describe two key network-level constructs – the equivalent link abstraction and the spine network management infrastructure – that enable the deployment of a scalable and flexible active network. We finally present some preliminary simulation and implementation results to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed architecture.