A proactive service architecture toward QoS-aware online business

Proactive services based on an active-packet technique can dynamically control their quality based on network conditions, customer requirements and service situations in a packet-by-packet manner. We have designed a proactive service architecture consisting of a service database installed in each active node and a service program in each active packet. The service database stores up-to-date information on network conditions and customer requirements. The service program describes how the information should be used and how to handle an active packet based on the information and the importance of individual packets (i.e., special treatment to forward and discard active packets). By referring to the information stored in every service database on the way to a customer, an active packet can decide the most suitable behavior for each active node. Moreover, an active node only needs to contain an execution environment of the service programs and the information database, which are independent of each proactive service. Therefore, without any modifications to a node's architecture, new proactive services can be provided merely by using a method to store the new information in the service database. Our architecture will be especially promising to build QoS-aware online services which are required to prevent the serious quality degradation caused by loss of packets delivering important data for the services.