Active Networks and its Management

Active networking is an expanding field of research. It includes the ability to easily install and modify customized network services and to process packets within the network in a customized way. This paper overviews active networking approaches and its management. It classifies different approaches to active networking on various criteria. Furthermore, some applications, or better application areas, which may profit from active network technology. The second part addresses the question of how the benefits of active networking can be exploited in an environment, where a number of customers must share a common network infrastructure also referred to as telecom environment in this paper. And it also lists possible drawbacks of the technology. In the third part, we introduce a management framework for active networks that allows customers to deploy and manage their own active services in a provider domain. The key concept in our framework is the Virtual Active Network (VAN). From the customer’s perspective, the VAN represents the environment in which the customer can install, run, and manage active services without interaction with the VAN provider. From the VAN provider’s perspective the VAN represents the object of resource partitioning and customer isolation. Active networking combined with the VAN concept allows for new business models in the telecom industry.