Component-based active network architecture

We believe that the `killer application´ of active networking will be the provision of services which are not known to either the hardware manufacturer or the vendor at the time of network deployment. This would enable the rapid deployment of new services by third parties, and an unprecedented level of customisation by network administrators and end users. This vision, however, requires a degree of flexibility not yet seen in any of the currently proposed active router architectures. The lack of flexibility found in current active router designs has inspired us to develop a novel component-based active router architecture enabling extensible network programmability based on a progressive service composition framework. This document presents this architecture, LARA++, discusses its rudimentary concepts, and illustrates by example how its component architecture can benefit network programmability