VM-based Distributed Active Router Design

The active network approach allows an individual user to inject customized programs into an active nodes in the network, usually called programmable/active routers, and thus process data in the network as it passes through. As the speeds of network links still increase, and subsequently, the applications’ demands for the network bandwidth increase as well, a single active router is infeasible to process such highbandwidth user data in real-time, since the processing may be fairly complex. In order to improve the scalability of such a system with respect to number of active programs simultaneously running on the router and with respect to the bandwidth of each passing stream processed by active sessions, the distribution of processing load and network bandwidth is desirable. The subject of this paper is to propose a distributed active router architecture with a loadable functionality that allows strong isolation of users’ programs using Virtual Machine (VM) approach.