From Active Networks to Cognitive Networks

Future networks need to be autonomic self-managed and provide resilient servicing, even when the hardware fails. To achieve this goal, two fundamental requirements need to be satisfied: (i) the service management and provisioning must be independent and decoupled of the infrastructure management, and (ii) a certain degree of cognitive behaviour needs to be achieved at the service management level. In achieving the first goal, which in turn will enable the pursuing of the second goal, active and programmable networks will play an important role. A problem though arises when we try to build and use actual active networks, as most research so far has focused at the node level and has left us with a unbridged diversity of platforms and execution environments, which are largely uninteroperable with each other. We introduce a toolkit that provides a set of mechanisms aiming to bridge this diversity and provide a set of functionalities and abstractions for uniform installation and deployment of services over active and programmable networks.