Architecture and Application of PLATO, A Reconfigurable Active Network Platform

A new, configurable architecture has been designed and built in order to serve as a platform for experimentation with active networks. This architecture, named PLATO, provides 4 physical bi-directional connections for ATM networks, large reconfigurable resources, 256 Mbytes SDRAM for buffer space, a PCI port, and auxiliary expansion ports. Several applications are presented for this platform, one of which has been prototyped on the PCI Pamette and on PLATO. Detailed simulations and experimental results show that, for some applications, a significant improvement can be obtained using this approach as compared to using conventional network architectures.