Active Networks: Towards Service Enabling Unified Net- works

Mounting competition among service providers is making it imperative for the providers to introduce new services and extend features of their existing ones to attract new customers. On the other hand, competition among network equipment vendors, such as Nortel Networks, is driving Network Elements to become a commodity item. In this scenario, the major revenue generator for Nortel will be to provide features in the Network Elements that help its customers to introduce new services. In this paper we present a case for Service Enabled Networks (SEN), which we consider as vital for Nortel Networks’ Unified Networks initiative to address the growing customer demands. We also present Active Networks as a key technology for SEN. Active Networks provide execution engines and a mechanism to safely deploy new code in the Network Elements to extend their functionality for service provisioning.