Aggregated hierarchical multicast for active networks

Active networking is the basis for a range of new and innovative applications that make use of computational resources inside network routers. One such application is aggregated hierarchical multicast, which aims at implementing efficient many-to-many communication. In certain scenarios, it is possible to transmit less accurate, aggregated data and thus achieve better scalability. Using active networks, the aggregation computation can be done transparently by network routers without end system support. We show how aggregated data streams can be structured in a hierarchical fashion to allow easy access of data at the desired aggregation level. We introduce two application examples to illustrate the system design, analyze the performance of the aggregation mechanism and evaluate it using a prototype implementation.