A service management toolkit for active networks

Active networking, where network nodes perform customized processing of packets, is a rapidly expanding field of research. This paper investigates the realization of service management on a virtual active network (VAN), the key concept in our management framework for active networks (Brunner and Stadler, 1999). A VAN is a generic service offered by the VAN provider to the customer. The VAN abstraction transforms a multi-domain environment into a single domain view for a customer. The customer can install, run and supervise active services into a VAN, without interaction with the provider. In this paper, we describe a service management toolkit, which facilitates designing and managing services taking advantage of active networking technology for code reuse, code distribution, flexible event filtering, and programmable information aggregation. Further, we show how the service management toolkit is realized on ANET, an active networking testbed that we built.