Active Protocols
Gordon Brebner
Division of Informatics
University of Edinburgh
There has been much recent research worldwide into Active Networks,
which provide a distributed processing environment with arbitrary
in-transit processing of packets. The generality of processing
introduces problems, particularly in the areas of safety and security.
Active Protocols are essentially a domain-specific specialisation,
in which the processing is related to the specific functions required
by communication protocols. The intention is to enable the use of
protocols that are statically or dynamically optimised to support
the specific quality of service required from a particular
connection. This is not possible when standard general-purpose
protocol stacks are used. The talk will explain the basic features
of active protocols, particularly their compositional nature,
and describe ongoing implementations both in software and in
programmable hardware.
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