CANEs: Composable Active Network Elements
Quarterly Status Report
Period: September 11, 1999 - December 11, 1999
Participants
Georgia Tech Faculty and Staff:
University of Kentucky Faculty:
GTE Laboratories:
Research Assistants:
- Youngsu Chae (GT)
- Richard Liston (GT)
- Shashidar Merugu (GT)
- Amit Sehgal (UK)
- Srinivasan Venkatramen (UK)
Accomplishments in the Quarter
We participated in the Team 4 DARPA demo in September
in Washington, DC. Matt Sanders provided considerable
coordination support to get equipment shipped to and from
the demo site and to get software installed and working
for the demos. Ken Calvert coordinated the Team 4 presentation
that accompanied the demo. Our demonstration was an
ambitious integration of components from different projects.
We were able to demonstrate interoperability of CANEs/Bowman
with the UMass/TASC active error recovery and WAN emulators
from NIST. For the November 2000 demos, we will demonstrate
the improvements in multicast video transmission quality achievable
by such an active networking system.
We led discussions of the Architecture (Calvert) and
Composable Services (Zegura) documents at the November PI
meeting in Albuquerque.
We completed two papers for publication in March 2000,
a Bowman paper to appear in Infocom'00 and a paper on
network query and synthesis to appear in OpenArch'00.
We have begun thinking about improvements to our virtual
topology instantiation protocol to allow scalable virtual
networks. The main idea is to divide responsibility for
virtual topology creation across managers, one per domain.
The managers communicate with one another for the high-level
structure, and then instantiate the necessary local topology.
We released an alpha version of Bowman and CANEs on our
website in November 1999. We are aware that the following
groups have copies of the code: TASC/UMass, U. of Illinois,
UC-Santa Cruz, BBN and Utah.
Publications and Presentations
- Merugu presented the invited paper "Bowman and CANEs:
Implementation of an Active Network" at the Allerton Conference
on Communication, Control and Computing, Monticello, Illinois,
September 1999. This paper appears in the proceedings.
- Zegura organized a session entitled "Active
Networks Platforms and Applications" as part of OpenSig'99
held in Pittsburgh, PA, October 1999.
- Calvert organized a panel entitled "Active Networks:
Where Do We Stand Today" as part of the International Conference
on Network Protocols (ICNP'99) held in Toronto, CA, November 1999.
- A paper entitled "Exposing the network: support for
topology-sensitive applications" was accepted for publication
in OpenArch'00.
Travel
- Calvert and Sanders traveled Washington, DC, for the
September DARPA demos.
- Merugu attended the Allerton Conference in Monticello, IL.
- Zegura attended OpenSig'99 in Pittsburgh, PA.
- Calvert attended ICNP'99 in Toronto, CA.
- Calvert and Zegura traveled to Albuquerque, NM for the
DARPA PI meeting in November 1999.
Administrative Issues
None to report.
Plans for Next Quarter
- Re-implement active error recovery (AER) in CANEs
using an alternative decomposition structure. This will
help us to better understand and demonstrate the composability
features of the CANEs execution environment.
- Continue to develop ideas in scalable virtual topology
instantiation, with addition consideration for the resource
reservation issues associated with topologies.
- Prepare for presentations at Infocom'00 and OpenArch'00.
- Consider options for restricting composition in CANEs
to allow some assurance for preserving the properties of
a composite service. This effort will also include implementation
of at least one additional composite service as a driver for
developing the ideas.
Ellen Witte Zegura
Last modified: Thu Mar 2 10:22:10 EST 2000