Towards the rapid network-wide deployment of new application specific network protocols, using application level active networking

In this thesis I try to show that traditional transport protocols (such as TCP) poorly match the requirements of today’s applications. Firstly, I develop two new user level protocols using Application Layer Framing (ALF) [20] concepts in order to test this hypothesis. A simple remote login program and a protocol to deliver mailing lists using multicast. In both cases I am able to show that application level protocols utilise less network resources than their traditional counterparts as well as providing improved responsiveness to the user. The development and deployment of new protocols is both difficult and time consuming. I consider a new mechanism for the deployment of protocols. Rather than attempting to deploy them in the end systems, new protocols entities are dynamically deployed into the network. These protocol entities are called proxylets and are written in the programming language Java. A whole infrastructure, funnelWeb, [34], has been built to allow the deployment of proxylets. A number of diverse applications are then built around proxylets to show benefits which can be derived from such a scheme. In order to make the funnelWeb infrastructure useful, when globally deployed, a routing infrastructure is designed and partially built.

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