A Generic Application-Oriented Networking (GAON) Simulation Framework for Next-Generation Internet

How to design the next-generation Internet is an open technique issue. One of the mainstream ideas is to enhance network routers with application-oriented intelligence. For example, firewalls,Web proxies/caches, mobile gateways, and multicast capable nodes are equipments with application-oriented intelligence for security/performance enhancement. However, there is no systematic study on what intelligence should be incorporated into the router and what the fundamental benefit of the application-oriented networking is. This paper presents a generic application-oriented networking (GAON) simulation framework compatible with the Network Simulator ns-2 to facilitate the research in the area. With GAON, developers can conveniently enhance the ns-2 nodes with customized functionalities, and seamlessly incorporate them into the regular ns-2 system. GAON provides a generic scenario control interface, through which ns- 2 users can flexibly load/unload customized GAON processing agents on network nodes. The regular ns-2 node structure is extended, where a GAON agent classifier is set up to dispatch GAON traffic to correct GAON agents. Moreover, a unified interface to the ns-2 built-in routing table is developed to facilitate GAON agents forwarding packets. Two multicast protocols are implemented to demonstrate the validation of GAON, with the simulation results presented.