Active Networks
The Active Networks program's goal was to produce a new networking platform, flexible and extensible at runtime to accommodate the rapid evolution and deployment of networking technologies and also to provide the increasingly sophisticated services demanded by defense applications.
The Active Nets architecture was based on a highly dynamic runtime environment that supports a finely tuned degree of control over network services. The packet itself is the basis for describing, provisioning, or tailoring resources to achieve the delivery and management requirements. A possible architecture utilizes a "Smart Packet" for the basic message unit on the Active Network; such a packet is an agent with the goal of delivering itself to its destination. The goal was expressed through a portion of the packet that describes its "method" -- a set of instructions that can be interpreted consistently by the Active Network nodes. The entire ensemble was engineered to allow security, reliability, availability and quality of service to be tuned at multiple levels of granularity and under a wide range of conditions.
The evolution of defense networks by the injection of newly designed services is needed in order to deploy new strategies or to tailor the infrastructure to immediate needs. The Active Network architecture would support this malleability as a first-class design goal, one that will reduce the time and cost of deploying new services. An additional dimension to network evolution was the ability to support a multiplicity of network behaviors to be supported through the "virtualization" of the underlying infrastructure. Other crucial research topics included routing, resource allocation and network management services built with active network concepts.
Crucial application areas that could benefit from the flexibility of the Active Network architecture, and breakthrough approaches would be sought. Areas of likely specialization included flexible, efficient, and secure protocols for: group communication strategies, scalable network management, quality of service management techniques, and radically more efficient routing protocols.
