Prototyping of an active and lightweight router

Abstract

A new network management system named Server and Agent based Active Management (SAAM) has been proposed. SAAM can locate and fix network problems much more quickly than today's systems. Stand-alone routers are used in current network architectures. In contrast, SAAM employs dedicated servers that collect packet performance information from the routers and use the collected information to predict, detect and respond to network problems. In other words, SAAM relieves individual routers from most routing and network management tasks. SAAM allows the development of a lightweight router. The primary goal of this thesis is to prototype a lightweight router that is suitable for the SAAM architecture. The Active Networking approach was explored. Active Networking refers to the addition of user-controllable computing capabilities to the network. The result of this thesis is a lightweight router running on a Linux machine. The router is connected to the Active Network Backbone (ABONE) by using a software package called Active NETworks Daemon (ANETD). ABONE is an experimental wide area network, where more in-depth research of SAAM router and server can be conducted. All major active network programming languages and their underlying support were evaluated. Verification of the lightweight router concept was conducted using server-probing experiments. The results demonstrate that it is straightforward for a SAAM server to collect performance information from lightweight routers that support active networking