Active network vision and reality: lessions from a capsule-based system

ABSTRACT

Although active networks have generated much debate in the research community, on the whole there has been little hard evidence to inform this debate. This paper aims to redress the situation by reporting what we have learned by designing, implementing and using the ANTS active network toolkit over the past two years. At this early stage, active networks remain an open research area. However, we believe that we have made substantial progress towards providing a more flexible network layer while at the same time addressing the performance and security concerns raised by the presence of mobile code in the network. In this paper, we argue our progress towards the original vision and the difficulties that we have not yet resolved in three areas that characterize a "pure" active network: the capsule model of programmability; the accessibility of that model to all users; and the applications that can be constructed in practice.

REFERENCES

• 1: D. Scott Alexander , Marianne Shaw , Scott M. Nettles , Jonathan M. Smith, Active bridging, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '97 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication, p.101-111, September 14-18, 1997, Cannes, France
• 2: Elan Amir , Steven McCanne , Randy Katz, An active service framework and its application to real-time multimedia transcoding, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '98 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication, p.178-189, August 31-September 04, 1998, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 3: F. Baker. Requirements for IP Version 4 Routers. Request for Comments 1812, IETF, June 1995.
• 4: Tony Ballardie , Paul Francis , Jon Crowcroft, Core based trees (CBT), Conference proceedings on Communications architectures, protocols and applications, p.85-95, September 13-17, 1993, San Francisco, California, United States
• 5: B. N. Bershad , S. Savage , P. Pardyak , E. G. Sirer , M. E. Fiuczynski , D. Becker , C. Chambers , S. Eggers, Extensibility safety and performance in the SPIN operating system, Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.267-283, December 03-06, 1995, Copper Mountain, Colorado, United States
• 6: S. Bhattacharjee , K. L. Calvert , E. W. Zegura, Active networking and the end-to-end argument, Proceedings of the 1997 International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP '97), p.220, October 28-31, 1997
• 7: Andrew Birrell , Greg Nelson , Susan Owicki , Edward Wobber, Network objects, Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.217-230, December 05-08, 1993, Asheville, North Carolina, United States
• 8: B. Braden et al. Recommendations on queue management and congestion avoidance in the internet. Request for Comments 2309, IETF, April 1998.
• 9: D. Clark, The design philosophy of the DARPA internet protocols, Symposium proceedings on Communications architectures and protocols, p.106-114, August 16-18, 1988, Stanford, California, United States
• 10: Darren C. Cronquist , Chris Fisher , Miguel Figueroa , Paul Franklin , Carl Ebeling, Architecture Design of Reconfigurable Pipelined Datapaths, Proceedings of the 20th Anniversary Conference on Advanced Research in VLSI, p.23, March 21-24, 1999
• 11: Dan Decasper , Zubin Dittia , Guru Parulkar , Bernhard Plattner, Router plugins: a software architecture for next generation routers, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '98 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication, p.229-240, August 31-September 04, 1998, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 12: D. Decasper and B. Plattner. DAN: Distributed Code Caching for Active Networks. In Conf. on Computer Communications (INFOCOM' 98), San Francisco, CA, April 1998. IEEE.
• 13: S. Deering et al. Protocol independent multicast-sparse mode (PIM-SM): Protocol Specification. Request For Comments 2362, IETF, June 1998.
• 14: Paul Francis , Ramesh Govindan, Flexible routing and addressing for a next generation IP, Proceedings of the conference on Communications architectures, protocols and applications, p.116-125, August 31-September 02, 1994, London, United Kingdom
• 15: R. Gilligan and E. Nordmark. Transition Mechanisms for IPv6 Hosts and Routers. Request For Comments 1933, IETF, April 1996.
• 16: M. Hicks et al. PLANnet: An Active Internetwork. In Cenf on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'99), pages 1124-1133, New York, NY, Mar. 1999. IEEE.
• 17: Hugh W. Holbrook , David R. Cheriton, IP multicast channels: EXPRESS support for large-scale single-source applications, Proceedings of the conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication, p.65-78, August 30-September 03, 1999, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
• 18: Wilson C. Hsieh , Marc E. Fiuczynski , Przemysław Pardyak , Brian N. Bershad, Type-safe casting, Software—Practice & Experience, v.28 n.11, p.1245-1252, Sept. 1998 [doi>10.1002/(SICI)1097-024X(199809)28:11<1245::AID-SPE196>3.3.CO;2-K ]
• 19: Norman C. Hutchinson , Larry L. Peterson, The X-Kernel: An Architecture for Implementing Network Protocols, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.17 n.1, p.64-76, January 1991 [doi>10.1109/32.67579 ]
• 20: E. Johnson. A Protocol for Network Level Caching. M.Eng Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 1998.
• 21: M. Frans Kaashoek , Dawson R. Engler , Gregory R. Ganger , Hector M. Briceño , Russell Hunt , David Mazières , Thomas Pinckney , Robert Grimm , John Jannotti , Kenneth Mackenzie, Application performance and flexibility on exokernel systems, Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.52-65, October 05-08, 1997, Saint Malo, France
• 22: Gregor Kiczales , Jim des Rivières , Daniel G. Bobrow, The art of metaobject protocol, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991
• 23: U. Legedza et al. Improving the Performance of Distributed Applications Using Active Networks. In Conf. on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'98), San Francisco, CA, April 1998. IEEE.
• 24: L. Lehman et al. Active Reliable Multicast. In Conf. on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'98), San Francisco, CA, April 1998. IEEE.
• 25: B. N. Levine , J. J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves, Improving Internet multicast with routing labels, Proceedings of the 1997 International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP '97), p.241, October 28-31, 1997
• 26: David Mazières , Michael Kaminsky , M. Frans Kaashoek , Emmett Witchel, Separating key management from file system security, Proceedings of the seventeenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.124-139, December 12-15, 1999, Charleston, South Carolina, United States
• 27: Paul Menage, RCANE: A Resource Controlled Framework for Active Network Services, Proceedings of the First International Working Conference on Active Networks, p.25-36, July 02, 1999
• 28: Robert Morris , Eddie Kohler , John Jannotti , M. Frans Kaashoek, The Click modular router, Proceedings of the seventeenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.217-231, December 12-15, 1999, Charleston, South Carolina, United States
• 29: George C. Necula , Peter Lee, The design and implementation of a certifying compiler, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1998 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.333-344, June 17-19, 1998, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• 30: E. Nygren et al. PAN: A High-Performance Active Network Node Supporting Multiple Code Systems. In 2nd Conf. on Open Architectures and Network Programming (OPENARCH'99), pages 78-89, New York, NY, Mar. 1999. IEEE.
• 31: C. Papadopoulos et al. An Error Control Scheme for Large-Scale Multicast Applications. In Conf. on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'98), San Francisco, CA, April 1998.
• 32: C. Partridge et al. Host Anycasting Service. Request For Comments 1546, IETF, Nov. 1993.
• 33: Vern Paxson, End-to-end Internet packet dynamics, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM '97 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication, p.139-152, September 14-18, 1997, Cannes, France
• 34: K. Ramakrishnan and S. Floyd. A Proposal to add Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to IP. Request For Comments 2481, IETF, Jan. 1999.
• 35: D. P. Reed et al. Commentaries on the Active Networking and End-to-End Arguments. IEEE Network Magazine, 12(3):69-71, May/June 1998.
• 36: R. Rivest. The MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm. Request For Comments 1321, IETF, April 1992.
• 37: M. Robshaw. On Recent Results for MD2, MD4, and MD5. RSA Laboratories Bulletin, Nov. 1996.
• 38: J. H. Saltzer , D. P. Reed , D. D. Clark, End-to-end arguments in system design, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS), v.2 n.4, p.277-288, Nov. 1984 [doi>10.1145/357401.357402]
• 39: B. Schwartz et al. Smart Packets for Active Networks. In 2nd Conf. on Open Architectures and Network Programming (OPENARCH' 99), New York, NY, Mar. 1999. IEEE.
• 40: P. Srisuresh and M. Holdrege. IP network address translator (NAT) terminology and considerations. Request For Comments 2663, IETF, Aug 1999.
• 41: David L. Tennenhouse , David J. Wetherall, Towards an active network architecture, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, v.26 n.2, p.5-17, April 1996 [doi>10.1145/231699.231701]
• 42: The Tolly Group. Cisco 12000 Series GSR POS: Performance Evaluation. No. 199128, Manasquan, NJ, Sep. 1999.
• 43: J. van der Merwe et al. The Tempest- A Practical Framework for Network Programmability. IEEE Network Magazine, 12(3), May/June 1998.
• 44: Robert Wahbe , Steven Lucco , Thomas E. Anderson , Susan L. Graham, Efficient software-based fault isolation, Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, p.203-216, December 05-08, 1993, Asheville, North Carolina, United States
• 45: David J. Wetherall , John V. Guttag , David L. Tennenhouse, Service introduction in an active network, 1999
• 46: D. Wetherall et al. ANTS: A Toolkit for Building and Dynamically Deploying Network Protocols. In 1 st Conf. on Open Architectures and Network Programming (OPENARCH'98), pages 117-129, San Francisco, CA, Apr 1998. IEEE.
• 47: David J. Wetherall , David L. Tennenhouse, The ACTIVE IP option, Proceedings of the 7th workshop on ACM SIGOPS European workshop: Systems support for worldwide applications, September 09-11, 1996, Connemara, Ireland [doi>10.1145/504450.504457]
• 48: Y. Yemini and S. da Silva. Towards Programmable Networks. In Intl. Work. on Dist. Systems Operations and Management, Italy, Oct. 1996.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS

General Terms:
Design