Investigation of Active Networking Components

It has long been known that different data applications have different service requirements. Active Networks offer the opportunity to provide applications and users lored explicitly from user and application instructions to precisely fit user and application needs. We propose to identify requirements for effective control and traffic management of distributed, multimedia, multiuser applications, , and determine how network information can be used to provide these services. We will examine both requirements of specific technologies employed by those applications and general requirements for coordinating distributed applications with the aim of abstracting general functions, commands, or features that will be benefit entire classes of applications, both those developed today and those to be developed in the future. We will then look for general methods for implementing these features and attempt to develop a set of requirements for selected application oriented Active Network features. Finally, we will examine proposed implementation methods and suggest how to use one or more of them to provide the selected Active Network features and algorithms. BENEFITS: This strategy will allow current Active Network techniques to be applied selectively where they can optimally provide demonstrated services to a new class of network and computer applications.