2012 Reports

NetServ: Reviving Active Networks

Lee, Jae Woo; Francescangeli, Roberto; Song, Wonsang; Janak, Jan; Maccherani, Emanuele; Srinivasan, Suman Ramkumar; Kester, Michael S.; Baset, Salman A.; Schulzrinne, Henning G.

In 1996, Tennenhouse and Wetherall proposed active networks, where users can inject code modules into network nodes. The proposal sparked intense debate and follow-on research, but ultimately failed to win over the networking community. Fifteen years later, the problems that motivated the active networks proposal persist. We call for a revival of active networks. We present NetServ, a fully integrated active network system that provides all the necessary functionality to be deployable, addressing the core problems that prevented the practical success of earlier approaches. We make the following contributions. We present a hybrid approach to active networking, which combines the best qualities from the two extreme approaches — integrated and discrete. We built a working system that strikes the right balance between security and performance by leveraging current technologies. We suggest an economic model based on NetServ between content providers and ISPs. We built four applications to illustrate the model.