Abstract
The paper reports on lessons learned from developing, deploying and operating LARA++ based active routers [1] along with a number of active services used daily in a real-life network environment. We evaluate how LARA++, which claims to be a truly generic and flexible active router architecture, performs when deployed in an operational network. The architecture is assessed whilst providing a range of diverse active services from well-known network services like NAT and firewalls to novel types of services such as Mobile IPv6 handoff optimisation. A particular challenge we consider is the transparent and concurrent introduction of new services by different end users and network administrators.
Besides a qualitative evaluation of the LARA++ architecture, the paper provides a number of quantitative results that show the performance of LARA++ whilst providing the different services. The results indicate that LARA++ not only supports highly generic programmability by independent users, but also provides sufficient performance for today’s edge networks.
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This research is funded by the EPSRC (grant number GR/R31461/01)
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Chart, T., Schmid, S., Sifalakis, M., Scott, A.C. (2004). Active Routers in Action: Evaluation of the LARA++ Active Router Architecture in a Real-Life Network. In: Wakamiya, N., Solarski, M., Sterbenz, J. (eds) Active Networks. IWAN 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2982. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24715-9_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24715-9_19
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