An Adaptive Network Node Architecture for Evolutionary Networks

The boom of Internet applications has resulted in ever increasing demands for new network services support. Different applications require different QoS, protocols and security mechanisms to be deployed in the network. These demand the network to evolve to keep pace with the change of application requirements. Unfortunately, the current Internet´s functions are very hard to expand and cope with the changing environment. A new extensible and adaptive network node architecture ENN is proposed in this paper for achieving an evolutionary network. New network services, protocols, control and management functions can be dynamically deployed on the ENN node so that the network can exhibit a flexible and application-sensitive behavior. Major technical issues related to ENN are discussed. A prototyping evolutionary network called FAN is designed and implemented. Experiments on FAN show that the ENN architecture is effective in promoting the evolution of the network.