Active Networks on a Gigabit Routing Switch

Wang P.; Jaeger R.; Duncan R.; Lavian T.; Travostino F.; 2nd Workshop on Active Middleware Services, 2000.

Current Active Networks (AN) research projects are mainly realized in software-based network systems since available hardware lacks networking programmability. This paper studies the deployment of AN services on the Accelar Gigabit Routing Switch. The Accelar is one of the Nortel Networks programmable networking products, and uses the ASIC technology to reach the high-speed forwarding capability. The Oplet Running Environment (ORE) and the Java Forwarding (JFWD) API provide the programmable interface to the Accelar. The ORE is a pure Java environment that enables the Accelar to download and initiate network services dynamically. Using the oplet encapsulation, AN execution environments (EEs) can be deployed on the Accelar as ORE services. The JFWD API provides access to underlying hardware resources to perform network operations such as diverting packets and altering packet processing.

We demonstrate the deployment of Active Networks EEs as network services managed by the ORE, specifically, the MIT ANTS EE. We have wrapped the MIT ANTS implementation with the ORE-mandated structure and successfully run ANTS applications over a network comprised pure and ORE encapsulated ANTS EEs. In conclusion, we present observations about the AN service deployment on the Accelar.