A Self-Deploying Election Service for Active Networks

Abstract

Active networking aims at minimizing the functionality that is built into a data network: Programmable nodes inside the network enable the deployment of new services at run-time. In a bottom-up approach we presume a network void from any functionality and study the problem of deploying and providing a basic, externally defined and non-trivial distributed service. As a test case we use the robust election of a coordinator. Based on the bully algorithm, we implemented an election service that is fully based on active packets. It deploys itself to every reachable active network segment, continuously scans for newly attached nodes and networks and provides a segment wide election service for all attached nodes. The implementation was carried out in the M0 messenger environment and tested in a worldwide active networks testbed. The complete and self-contained initial ‘election service germ’ fits in less than 1’200 Bytes and asserts the ubiquitous presence of this service.

Part of this work was done while at the Computer Science Department of the University of Zurich, Switzerland.