Some investigations on the applications of active networks to video communication

We give an analysis of the application of an emergent technique, namely the active network, to video communication. We advocate the use of active agents on boundary routers to perform user-specific dynamically programmable services, such as error-resilient retransmission mechanisms, dynamic filtering either solicited by user or dictated by networks, the handling of multicast over heterogeneous links etc. Our experiments on a PC-based test-bed indicate that these operations should be feasible in an efficient way