Status of this Memo This document is an Internet Draft. Internet Drafts are working documents

Active networking in environments built to support link rates up to several gigabits per second poses many challenges. One such challenge is that the memory bandwidth and individual processing power of the router's microprocessors limit the total available processing power of a router. In this paper, we identify and describe three key components, which promise a high performance active network solution. This solution implements the key features typical to active networking, such as automatic protocol deployment and application specific processing, and it is suitable for a gigabit environment. First, we describe the hardware of the Active Network Node (ANN), a scalable, high performance platform based on off-the-shelf CPUs connected to a gigabit ATM switch backplane. Second, we introduce the ANN's modular, extensible and highly efficient operating system (NodeOS). Third, we describe an Execution Environment running on top of the NodeOS, which implements a novel large-scale active networ...

Many important and useful applications for software agents require multiple agents on a network that communicate with each other. Such agents must find each other and perform a useful joint computation without having to know about every other such agent on the network. This paper describes a matchmaker system, designed to find people with similar interests and introduce them to each other. The matchmaker is designed to introduce everyone, unlike conventional Internet media which only allow those who take the time to speak in public to be known. The paper details how the agents that make it up the matchmaking system can function in a decentralized fashion, yet can group themselves into clusters which reflect their users' interests; these clusters are then used to make introductions or allow users to send messages to others who share their interests. The algorithm uses referrals from one agent to another in the same fashion that word-of-mouth is used when people are looking for an exper...

In this paper we present an architecture and prototype implementation for discovering key network characteristics, such as hosts, gateways, and topology. The Fremont system uses an extensible set of modules to discover information, based on a variety of different protocols and information sources, rather than a single network management protocol. This approach allows more complete and timely information to be discovered than, for example, using only one protocol, even one as capable as the Simple Network Management Protocol. The discovered information is time-stamped and recorded in a database. The contents of this database are cross-correlated to form an increasingly complete network picture, to direct further discovery, and to highlight inconsistent information.

We present the design and evaluation of the query-routing protocol of the TerraDir distributed directory. TerraDir is a wide-area distributed directory designed for hierarchical namespaces, and provides a lookup service for mapping keys to objects. We introduce distributed lookup and caching algorithms that leverage the underlying data hierarchy. Our algorithms provide efficient lookups while avoiding the load imbalances often associated with hierarchical systems. The TerraDir load balancing scheme also incorporates a node replication algorithm that provides configurable failure resilience with provably low overheads.

OF THE DISSERTATION Path IDs: A Mechanism for Reducing Network Software Latency by Jonathan Simon Kay Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science and Engineering University of California, San Diego, 1994 Professor Joseph Pasquale, Chair Network performance is important to an increasing number of computer applications. Similarly, network hardware performance is climbing to meet the demands of these new applications, with the advent of 100-megabit Ethernet, ATM, and fast processors to drive them. By contrast, network software latency is improving relatively slowly. It poses a barrier to the increasing use of networks for a wide variety of applications; as this dissertation shows, minimizing latency is more important to the minimization of processing time of the overall network workload than maximizing throughput. This dissertation introduces PathIDs, a means of reducing network latency. The latency problem is exacerbated both by the relative lack of research into latency op...

This thesis addresses the challenge of locating people, resources, and other objects in the global Internet. As the Internet grows beyond a million hosts in tens of thousands of organizations, it is increasingly difficult to locate any particular object. Hierarchical name services are frustrating, because users must guess the unique names for objects or navigate the name space to find information. Descriptive (i.e. relational) name services offer the promise of simple resource location through a non-procedural query language. Users locate resources by describing resource attributes. This thesis makes the promise of descriptive name services real by providing fast query processing in large internets. The key to speed in descriptive query processing is constraining the search space using two new techniques, called an active catalog and meta-data caching. The active catalog constrains the search space for a query by returning a list of data repositories where the answer to the query is li...

Sharing global remote data over large networks poses two major problems: firstly, the data must be discovered; and secondly, the data must be made accessible to the application. Our aim is to provide a single unified interface to both local and remote data, removing location dependence and improving performance. Our solution incorporates shared memory and caching techniques. A location server provides a location transparent addressing scheme which is used to provide failure tolerant retrieval. Access is provided via the "native" system interfaces. We include a brief discussion of other protocols and systems for distribution and sharing of data. 1 Introduction The amount of globally available data is increasing dramatically every year and with the rising number of multi-media applications, the types of data are changing. The ratio of direct information content to overall data size is decreasing steadily. For example, an audio file may only contain 10 spoken words but be hundreds of kil...

This memorandum describes RTP, the real-time transport protocol. RTP provides end-to-end network transport functions suitable for applications transmitting real-time data, such as audio, video or simulation data, over multicast or unicast network services. RTP does not address resource reservation and does not guarantee quality-of-service for real-time services. The data transport is augmented by a control protocol (RTCP) to allow monitoring of the data delivery in a manner scalable to large multicast networks, and to provide minimal control and identification functionality. RTP and RTCP are designed to be independent of the underlying transport and network layers. The protocol supports the use of RTP-level translators and mixers. This specification is a product of the Audio/Video Transport working group within the Internet Engineering Task Force. Comments are solicited and should be addressed to the working group's mailing list at rem-conf@es.net and/or the authors. INTERNET-...

This document specifies the operational requirements of root name servers, including host hardware capacities, name server software revisions, network connectivity, and physical environment.