A Cluster-Based Router Architecture for Massive and Various Computations in Active Networks

Traditional network routers are passive in a manner of speaking because they can not manipulate packets but just deliver them. On the contrary, an active network is an innovative approach to the network architecture. Active routers can perform customized computations on the packet flowing through them. They thus can easily adopt or remove protocols and perform operations such as firewall, content-based switching, and multimedia broadcasting. However, they may suffer from the lack of computational power in the near future due to growing active applications. Cluster-based active router can be a solution of this problem. A cluster system is easier to build than a multiprocessor system and brings out similar computing performance. We designed a cluster-based router architecture to share the overall computational load. In our design, packets can be forwarded to other nodes within the cluster using high-speed interconnect network. Therefore, busy node’s load can be transferred to other nodes quickly. To test the feasibility of our cluster-based active router design, we modified existing active router daemon, Anetd, so that it can work on the cluster and forward packets inside the cluster. After performing some micro-benchmark, we observed that overall latency is reduced.

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