The RadioActive networking architecture

This paper describes the activities in application level active networks (ALAN) under the DARPA-funded RADIOACTIVE Project; this is closely related to work carried out under a European Commission project ANDROID. The ALAN infrastructure was developed mainly under other projects; it is summarized mainly for background. The version used relies on separate active applications driven by policies, with the policies expressed in XML. There are two principal applications carried through in this project: adaptation of multicast, multimedia conferencing tools (M-Bone) and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The former were developed in other projects; the latter derives from the X-Bone overlay networks of ISI. It is an important aspect of the project that the final activity all works in the context of IPv6. The paper describes the measures that were required to make the applications into ALAN ones, and the problems encountered in moving all the components to work in the IPv6 environment.