New Mechanisms for Extending PLAN Functionality in Active Networks

摘要

PLAN (Packet Language for Active Networks) has emerged as an important execution execution engine for deploying active network applications. PLAN adopts a hybrid active packets and nodes architecture to provide safety, security, flexibility and performance. This paper presents some research results of an ongoing project within the Secure Active VPN Environment (SAVE) project in active networks at Dalhousie University. PLAN has been selected as the execution engine for running experiments on our test bed. In this paper, we propose two novel mechanisms for extending the functionality of PLAN. First, we introduce a mechanism to deploy services in PLAN using a C-Bridge. The C-Bridge enables the programmer to create services in C, thus enhancing the efficiency, Flexibility and accessibility of PLAN. The second mechanism presented consists of an enhancement in the way PLAN communicates with Java applications. The enhancement presented comes from fixing a possible oversight in PLAN and by improving memory management.