The Pronto platform: a flexible toolkit for programming networks using a commodity operating system

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in introducing more advanced services and functionality into networks. This is the primary driver behind the ongoing research on active and programmable networking. A central part of this research is to design an extensible architecture for network nodes that can be dynamically specialized to provide customized network services, to converge on a set of basic facilities provided by all nodes, and to provide the interface to these facilities. While several architectures have been proposed, they have so far been realized using prototype operating systems or proprietary programming languages. Lack of robust platforms for experimentation remains a significant obstacle for research on new network services. We have built a platform for research on active and programmable networks, based on Linux. Our changes to the kernel proper are minimal and are contained in a small kernel patch that is compatible with multiple versions of Linux (2.2.2 and higher), enabling us to benefit from the rapid evolution and industrial support of Linux in general, and specifically those parts that are outside of our interests. In this paper, we describe the platform and give examples of its use