Active Networks at UW

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People  David Wetherall  Andrew Whitaker  Janos folk at Utah  STP folk at Utah

We have a range of research in the area of active networks and more generally extensible distributed systems. Pointers to STP and ANTS, our main active network projects, are below. See also the Scriptroute page for an open Internet measurement facility that uses code-shipping and runs on Planet:Lab. STP (Self-spreading Transport Protocols) The main STP page is at Utah; please check there for up-to-date software and information. STP is a system developed by the University of Washington and the University of Utah to support the rapid evolution of transport protocols. New transport protocols are written in a type-safe version of C and run in-kernel. STP-enabled end-hosts then exchange these untrusted transports when they wish to communicate with each other. This late binding of protocols to hosts removes many of the delays and constraints that are otherwise commonplace when upgrading the transport protocols deployed on the Internet. The key challenge in developing a practical system for transport evolution is to achieve a synthesis: dual-end upgrades must be sufficiently expressive to encode a large set of transport protocols including those yet to be invented, sufficiently low-level to achieve high levels of performance, and still sufficiently restricted so that they can be checked for a multitude of safety and security properties. Both the network at large and the two end hosts must be protected from ill effects. Papers Upgrading Transport Protocols Using Mobile Code Parveen Patel, Andrew Whitaker, David Wetherall, Jay Lepreau, Tim Stack 19th Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), Oct, 2003. TCP Meets Mobile Code Parveen Patel, Jay Lepreau, David Wetherall, Andrew Whitaker 9th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, May, 2003. Last updated 11.11.2005 by djw. ANTS (Active Node Transfer System) ANTS is a Java-based toolkit that has been widely-used for experimenting with active networks. It provides a node runtime that can participate in an active network, and a protocol programming model that allows users to customize the forwarding of their packets. Software See the Utah Flux ANTS EE page for the current status and material on their Java NodeOS. The latest distribution contained here is version 2.0.2, released on 12/7/1 (read the README ). Previous versions include 2.0 and 1.3.1.  Some links to local documentation: A brief manual for installing and using ANTS 2. A description of the ANTS security model . The ANTS 2.0 API A wealth of information is contained in David Wetherall's thesis Talks Forwarding Without Loops in Icarus, 5th OPENARCH, June 2002. Towards an Active Network Architecture:  An Epilogue (DANCE, 5-02) Containing Runaway Network Protocols with Icarus (DARPA ANets PI meet, 6-01) Papers Forwarding without loops in Icarus Andrew Whitaker and David Wetherall 5th IEEE Conference on Open Architectures and Network Programming (OPENARCH), June 2002. Earlier and classic papers are below. (See Wetherall's home page for a more complete list.) Active Network Vision  and Reality:  Lessons from a Capsule-Based System David Wetherall Proceedings of the 17th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP'99), Kiawah Island, SC, December 1999. This is the "experience" paper on ANTS. Next Century Challenges: RadioActive Networks Vanu Bose, David Wetherall, and John Guttag ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom'99), Seattle, WA, August 1999. A software-defined radio position paper on applying active network ideas to the physical layer of wireless networks. ANTS: Network Services without the Red Tape David Wetherall, John Guttag and David Tennenhouse IEEE Computer, 32(4):42-9, April 1999. A magazine article describing the active network approach and ANTS. Service Introduction in an Active Network David Wetherall Ph.D. Thesis, available as MIT/LCS/TR-773, February 1999. This is the most detailed source of information on the design and use of ANTS. ANTS: A Toolkit for Building and Dynamically Deploying Network Protocols David Wetherall, John Guttag, and David Tennenhouse IEEE OPENARCH'98, San Francisco, CA, April 1998. The first paper describing the design and implementation of ANTS. A Survey of Active Network Research David Tennenhouse, J. M. Smith, W. D. Sincoskie, David Wetherall, and G. J. Minden IEEE Communications, 35(1): 80-6, January 1997.  The ACTIVE IP Option David Wetherall and David Tennenhouse Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGOPS European Workshop, Connemara, Ireland, September 1996.  An early active network system, preceding ANTS. Towards an Active Network Architecture David Tennenhouse and David Wetherall Computer Communication Review, 26(2), April 1996.  The early vision paper putting forth the case for active networks. Last updated 11.11.2005 by djw

	Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA  98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to djw]