Introduction

Active networks can process the packets from the end-users in a user-specific way through providing a mechanism for loading and executing the user-specific programs in the network nodes. However, this exposes also more resources in the network nodes to the applications: active applications may consume more various resources in the network nodes, such as CPU cycles, memory and network bandwidth, more aggressively than the applications in the traditional IP-based networks. The status of the different resource may be thereby not equally balanced.

The goal of this project is to seek a suitable method for managing the resources in the active nodes, taking the characteristics of the resource consumption in active networks into account, e.g. multi-dimensional, complementary and high-level sharing etc. Active networks are becoming a reality. It is also hopeful that the works of resource management in an active node can provide a basis for the deploying and management of the active networks.

Project description

This project studies the resource management in the active nodes from the point of view of the relationship among different types of resources. Following points are discussed in this project:

• Description of the resource usages in the active networks, e.g. the resource requirement from the applications, the resources consumed by each application in the active node, the system resources status etc.
• Fine-grained resource accounting, including CPU cycles, memory and bandwidth resource.
• Resource adaptation, including the resource tradeoff among the same type and different types, inside the same and among different applications.
• Remote resource monitoring.

An active node architecture with an explicit resource management subsystem is implemented based on the pioneer works of ANTS2.0 and Janos in the field of active networks. This active node will perform resource admission control, adaptation to each application. It has also an interactive environment, you may try here.

Project members

• Yuhong Li
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Lars Wolf
• Fangming Xu

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Yuhong Li.

Publications and presentations

• Yuhong Li and Lars Wolf, "Collection of Network Information in Active Networks", Operating Systems Review 35 (4): 39-49 (2001).
• Yuhong Li and Lars Wolf, "An Active Network Node System with Adaptive Resource Management", in Proc. of ICT2002, Beijing, China.
• Yuhong Li and Lars Wolf, "Adaptive Resource Management in Active Network Nodes", accepted by IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC2003), Antalya, Turkey.

Theses for this project

Related work

• ANTS - an Active Node Transfer System
• The Janos Project: Java-oriented Active Network Operating System
• Here has more information about Active Networks