From Internet to ActiveNet

Request for Comments, January 1996.

Authors

D. L. Tennenhouse, S.J. Garland, L. Shrira and M.F. Kaashoek

Abstract

The ActiveNet will address the mismatch between the rate at which user requirements can change, i.e., overnight, and the pace at which physical assets can be deployed. As the Internet grows it is increasingly difficult to maintain, let alone accelerate, the pace of innovation. Today, after a concept is prototyped its large scale deployment takes about 8 years. The ActiveNet will accelerate the pace of innovation by decoupling network services from the underlying hardware and by allowing new services to be demand loaded into the infrastructure. In the same way that IP enabled a range of upper layer protocols and transmission substrates, the ActiveNet will facilitate the development of new network services and hardware platforms.

Active Networks represent a new approach to network architecture that incorporates interposed computation. These networks are "active" in two ways: routers and switches within the network can act on, i.e., perform computations on, user data flowing through them; furthermore, users can "program" the network, by supplying their own programs to perform these computations.

We propose that interested researchers work towards the deployment of a wide area ActiveNet, based on the active network approach. This experimental infrastructure will be overlaid on existing transmission facilities, such as the Internet, using similar techniques to those used by the prototype MBONE, i.e., by "tunneling" through existing networks. The connectivity available through existing substrates will enable the parallel deployment of a few different programming models, providing an opportunity to explore alternatives. Researchers at Bellcore, BBN, CMU, Columbia, John Hopkins, U. Arizona, UCLA, U. Penn and U. Washington have agreed to work towards this goal and other organizations, in both industry and academia, have expressed interest in participating.

Our work is motivated by user "pull", as well as technology "push". The "pull" comes from the ad hoc collection of firewalls, Web proxies, multicast routers, mobile proxies, video gateways, etc. that perform user-driven computation at nodes "within" the network. These nodes are flourishing, suggesting user and management demand for their services. One goal of our work is to replace the present collection of ad hoc approaches with a generic capability that allows users to program their networks.

The technology "push" is the emergence of "active technologies", supporting the encapsulation, transfer, interposition, and safe and efficient execution of program fragments. Today, active technologies are applied above the end-to-end network layer; for example, to allow clients and servers to exchange program fragments. Our innovation is to leverage and extend these technologies for use within the network - in ways that will fundamentally change today's model of what is "in" the network.

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