Multimedia data transmission and control using active networks

Active network is an excellent paradigm to provide customized network services to the applications by allowing them to inject specific program to the intermediate routers. Active networks provide the flexibility for the application programs to modify the services that a router can provide to suit its specific needs. Therefore, it has the potential to provide application-level quality of service (QoS) at the transport and network layers. In this paper, we present an adaptable network architecture, called ADNET, which provides mechanisms to allow the application adapt to the resource constraints to achieve improved QoS. Our design aims to unify different QoS control mechanisms (e.g. integrated services, differentiated services, and active networks) together to provide a wide range of network services to all users to meet their specific needs. We propose a new fragmentation scheme with low overhead (!5%) to transfer large-size multimedia data. Using this fragmentation scheme, a new transport protocol, called ACtive Transport Protocol (ACTP) is integrated with the design. We use a new measure, called usefulness, to better reflect the QoS perceived by the end-users. In our experiments, we compare different schemes of video transmissions: non-active transport protocols such as UDP and TCP with IP fragmentation, ACTP framework with active networks, and ACTP framework without active networks. The ACTP scheme with active networks outperforms the others in achieving application level QoS. q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.