How Much CPU Time? Expressing Meaningful Processing Requirements among Heterogeneous Nodes in an Active Network

Active Network technology envisions deployment of virtual execution environments within network elements, such as switches and routers, so that nonhomogeneous processing can be applied to network traffic associated with services, flows, or even individual packets. To use such a technology safely and efficiently, individual nodes must provide mechanisms to enforce resource limits associated with specific network traffic. In order to provide enforcement mechanisms, each node must have a meaningful understanding of the resource requirements for specific network traffic. In Active Network nodes, resource requirements typically come in three categories: bandwidth, memory, and processing. Wellaccepted metrics exist for expressing bandwidth (bits per second) and memory (bytes) in units independent of the capabilities of particular nodes. Unfortunately, no well-accepted metric exists for meaningfully expressing processing (i.e., CPU time) requirements in a platform-independent form. This paper proposes a method to express the CPU time requirements of Active Network applications in a form that can be meaningfully interpreted among heterogeneous nodes in an Active Network.