CLARA: A CLuster-based Active Router Architecture

Personalization of web-based content coupled with a proliferation of heterogeneous terminals and devices will dramatically increase the need for computational services. Current trends towards thin clients make it difficult to perform such computation at the terminal end, while service providers frequently out-source computation, especially when operating under varying load. Today, most computational services utilize a traditional distributed systems model, which does not scale to Internet proportions. To alleviate this problem, we believe that computational services should instead be provided on a highly-distributed, besteffort basis, which has proven successful for packet routing in IP networks. In this paper, we describe an architecture that collocates routing and computational functionality, thereby providing a scalable computational service within a network. The prototype we have built utilizes multiple off-the-shelf PC’s to provide the necessary computational power. Initial experiments indicate that our proposed architecture can be utilized to perform real-time transcoding of video with minimal overhead. Moreover, the architecture does not incur any overhead on conventional IP routing. Keywords—cluster computing, active network, router architecture, multimedia streaming, MPEG transcoder