ANTS: a toolkit for building and dynamically deploying network protocols

The authors present a novel approach to building and deploying network protocols. The approach is based on mobile code, demand loading, and caching techniques. The architecture of the system allows new protocols to be dynamically deployed at both routers and end systems, without the need for coordination and without unwanted interaction between co-existing protocols. They describe the architecture and its realization in a prototype implementation. To demonstrate how to exploit the architecture, they present two simple protocols that operate within the prototype to introduce multicast and mobility services into a network that initially lacks them.