PLANet: an active internetwork

Author

Hicks, Michael ; Moore, Jonathan T. ; Alexander, D. Scott ; Gunter, Carl A. ; Nettles, Scott M.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. & Inf. Sci., Pennsylvania Univ., Philadelphia, PA, USA

Volume

3

fYear

1999

fDate

21-25 Mar 1999

Firstpage

1124

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

Keywords

Internet; internetworking; local area networks; packet switching; performance evaluation; programming languages; telecommunication network routing; transport protocols; 100 Mbit/s; 300 MHz; 48 Mbit/s; Ethernet; IP; Internet-like services; Linux user-space applications; ML dialect; OCaml; PLAN; PLANet; Packet Language for Active Networks; Pentium-II; active internetwork; active network architecture; active network implementation; byte-code-interpreted applications; congested conditions; dynamic router extensions; link layers; network performance; networking operations; packet programs; packet switching; performance; programmability features; router functionality; special purpose programming language; Computer architecture; Computer languages; Computer networks; Dynamic programming; Ethernet networks; IP networks; Information science; Planets; Switches; Web and internet services;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

INFOCOM '99. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. Proceedings. IEEE

Conference_Location

New York, NY

ISSN

0743-166X

Print_ISBN

0-7803-5417-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/INFCOM.1999.751668

Filename

751668