Technical Report MIT-LCS-TR-723. Master of Engineering thesis, May 1997.
An Active IP Network integrates two very different network programming models, an IP packet based model, and an Active Network capsule based model. This report shows how to integrate these two models into a single node, called an Active IP node, and how to integrate an Active IP node into an IP network. It also presents some preliminary ideas on the constraints network architects will face when building Active protocols for a heterogeneous network of Active and non-Active IP nodes.
By using a model of constant and variable processing, integrating the Active and IP architectures has lead to a clean and simple node design and implementation. Furthermore, mechanisms presented in this report, such as protected buffers, provide various safety constraints which aid in the integration.
Finally, this report presents some preliminary performance results which, when combined with the above characteristics, suggest that the Active IP platform will be appealing to researchers who wish to study application specific protocols for the Internet.