Extensible routers for active networks

Abstract

This paper describes our effort to build an extensible router in support of active networks. Our work is driven by two goals: (1) supporting the injection of new functionality into a router, and (2) exploiting commercially available hardware. Our approach is a hierarchical architecture, in which packet flows traverse a range of processing/forwarding paths. This paper both presents the architecture, and describes our experiences implementing the architecture across a combination of general-purpose and network processors.