Recently developed net worked services have been demanding architectures that accommodate an increasingly diverse range of applications requirements (e.g. mobility, multicast, QoS), as well as system requirements (e.g. exploiting specialized processing hardware). This is particularly crucial for architectures of network systems where the lack of extensibility and interoperability has been a constant struggle, hindering the Provision of novel services. It is also clear that to achieve such flexibility these systems must support extensibility and re-configurability of the base functionality subsequent to the initial deployment. Based on our experience with middleware platforms, we argue that re-configurability of network services is best implemented by means of reflection.
In this position paper we present component-based approach to developing flexible networked systems, especially targeted at the Intel IXP 1200 programmable networking environment and discuss how our approach can offer a more deployable, flexible and extensible networking infrastructure. We show the viability of our component model to re-configure services on the Intel 1XP1200 platform. An application scenario is presented to validate our approach to enable re-configuration of’ services across different layers of an IXP1200-based router platform
