PLANet: an active internetwork
| Title | PLANet: an active internetwork |
| Publication Type | Conference Papers |
| Year of Publication | 1999 |
| Authors | Hicks MW, Moore JT, Alexander DS, Gunter CA, Nettles SM |
| Conference Name | IEEE INFOCOM '99. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Proceedings |
| Date Published | 1999/03/21/25 |
| Publisher | IEEE |
| ISBN Number | 0-7803-5417-6 |
| Keywords | 100 Mbit/s, 300 MHz, 48 Mbit/s, active internetwork, active network architecture, active network implementation, byte-code-interpreted applications, Computer architecture, Computer languages, Computer networks, congested conditions, dynamic programming, dynamic router extensions, Ethernet, Ethernet networks, INFORMATION SCIENCE, Internet, Internet-like services, internetworking, IP, IP networks, link layers, Linux user-space applications, Local area networks, ML dialect, Network performance, networking operations, OCaml, Packet Language for Active Networks, packet programs, packet switching, Pentium-II, performance, performance evaluation, PLAN, PLANet, Planets, programmability features, programming languages, router functionality, special purpose programming language, Switches, telecommunication network routing, Transport protocols, Web and internet services |
| Abstract | We present PLANet: an active network architecture and implementation. In addition to a standard suite of Internet-like services, PLANet has two key programmability features: (1) all packets contain programs; and (2) router functionality may be extended dynamically. Packet programs are written in our special purpose programming language PLAN, the Packet Language for Active Networks, while dynamic router extensions are written in OCaml, a dialect of ML. Currently, PLANet routers run as byte-code-interpreted Linux user-space applications, and support Ethernet and IP as link layers. PLANet achieves respectable performance on standard networking operations: on 300 MHz Pentium-II's attached to 100 Mbps Ethernet, PLANet can route 48 Mbps and switch over 5000 packets per second. We demonstrate the utility of PLANet's activeness by showing experimentally how it can nontrivially improve application and aggregate network performance in congested conditions |
| DOI | 10.1109/INFCOM.1999.751668 |