Telemedia Networks and Systems Group.pdfVIP

The ACTIVE IP Option David J Wetherall and David L Tennenhouse Telemedia Networks and Systems Group Laboratory for Computer Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology Abstract In this p aper we discuss our work on an active network architecture in which p assive p ackets are replaced with active capsules encapsulated pr ogram fr agments that are executed at each switch they traverse This approach al lows applicationspecic pr ocessing to be injected into the network The accessibility of computa tion and storage within the network pr ovides a substrate that can be tailored to build global applications including those that invoke customized multicast and merge pr ocessing We describe an extension to the IP options mechanism that supports the embedding of pr ogram fr agments in datagrams and the evaluation of these fr agments as they traverse the Internet The active option pr ovides a generic approach to the extension of the IP network service Active Networks Traditional data networks passively transp ort bits from one end system to another Ideally the user data is transferred opaquely with the role of computation within such networks b eing extremely limited eg header pro cessing in packetswitched networks and signaling in connectionoriented networks Active Networks TW break with tradition by allowing the network to p erform customized computations on the user data For example a user of an active network could send a customized video transco ding program to a no de within the network eg a router and request that the no de execute that program when pro cessing their packets These networks are active in two ways  switches