Abstract
Active technologies have the potential to increase the intelligence and flexibility of modern networks – networks that are experiencing a consistently and exponentially increasing amount of traffic. Active technologies require flexibility in network routers and this typically means software. The flexibility offered by software solutions tends to work against the increasing performance requirements of future network routers. This paper proposes a solution to this problem and describes the result of efforts to build a prototype system. The proposed solution is to apply custom, reconfigurable computing technologies, new synthesis and compilation technology, and hardware models to active network devices. In short, to develop “active hardware” that integrates active software with adaptive computing. Elements of the proposed architecture, the execution environment, strategies for active hardware, and a stream-based hardware prototype are discussed in the context of a reconfigurable router. The reconfigurable router has the potential to allow protocol designers without hardware design experience to develop protocols that execute at hardware-level performance with software-level reconfigurability.
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Lee, D.C., Jones, M.T., Midkiff, S.F., Athanas, P.M. (1999). Towards Active Hardware. In: Covaci, S. (eds) Active Networks. IWAN 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1653. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-48507-0_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-48507-0_16
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