Architectural Business Cycle(ABC)

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Following is the Architectural Business Cycle (ABC) of the Active Networks.

End Users - The Active Networks program has the goal of producing a new networking platform, flexible and extensible at runtime for users of networks especially of secure networks. An active network provides a means to accommodate the rapid evolution and deployment of networking technologies and also to provide the increasingly sophisticated services demanded by defense applications.  

Users of active networks are allowed to inject customized programs into the nodes of the network. Laptop users benefit from host mobility and transport services optimized for wireless transmission. 

Technical Environment  -The nodes of the network are programmable entities and application code is executed at these nodes to implement new services or protocols. There must exist mechanisms to prevent application programs from intentionally or unintentionally compromising the integrity of the internal data structures at the Active Nodes or those of the other SmartPackets executing at the node. Current network node architectures are overly restrictive in these matters. Since application code is allowed to create its own data structures and implement its own mechanisms, there is a need to limit the memory and processing requirements of the SmartPackets to prevent runaway execution or memory hogging. Active Nodes have to interact with the SmartPackets to learn about their resource requirements and in turn the SmartPackets have to know about the availability of resources at the Active Node.

To create secure, survivable networks, Active Nodes should be able to authenticate the sender of the SmartPacket and authorize the access privileges given to the SmartPacket. All this information has to be embedded in the SmartPacket. Another aim is at developing an Infrastructure necessary for routing SmartPackets in the Active Network. Object serialization is one technique for preserving and transporting state. The state of an executing object is written out as a byte array in a particular format. The byte array is then transported across the network to the neighboring Active Node where the bytes in the array are used to re-create the SmartPacket. There is an added advantage in using object serialization. This permits widespread integration of the different Active Network architectures. [5]&[6]

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