Policy-based Resource Management for Application Level Active Networks

Abstract

The emerging active network concepts, particularly those focusing on the application level, will provide the users with the flexibility of deployment of customised services on the operator's infrastructure. This will be achieved through deployment of user customised control code in virtual execution environments residing on the network nodes such as routers and servers. In order to achieve efficient network operation, the resource consumption on both element and network levels must be managed. In an active networking environment resource requirements come in three categories: bandwidth, memory and processing. Based on the active networking architecture proposed in the IST project ANDROID, we develop resource models and metrics that take into account these three resource categories. The resource models are further used to define the necessary classes of policies in order to achieve efficient resource management. Policies are expressed in XML, and an example policy is given. Finally, we present an experiment comparing the use of alternative resource allocation policies. We also briefly discuss some security issues in the application level active networks