Friendly active network system (FANS) for heterogeneous bandwidth environment in a European - Asian virtual organizations

Streaming multimedia applications over the Internet is facing the problem of the diversity of network bandwidth at the client sides, in particular to small universities, offices or home Internet in some countries. To reliably reach these types of clients some works such as receiver-driven multicast and resilient overlay networks (RON) have been developed but these efforts mainly call for modification on router level management or place additional layer to the current Internet structure. Developed for the same purpose FANS on the other hand requires no changes in router level management and put no additional requirement to the current Internet architecture. It is purely application level approach. Adopting ALAN approach, FANS participants are referred through its universal resource locator (url). The system intercepts traffic flowing from source to destination and to do post-processing at an intermediate peer. The process is performed at the application level instead of at the router level which was the original approach of active networks. FANS member's tracking system dynamically detects the existence of a newly joined mobile device given its url is available and announced. In ALAN, the servers and the middle nodes are priori known and hence static. Potential FANS applications include distance education to clients with heterogeneous bandwidth in addition to stream multimedia applications to mobile device with low bandwidth capacity.