Advanced Relay Nodes for Adaptive Network Services - Concept and Prototype Experiment

Due to explosive growth of Internet usage with diversifying communication technologies and applications, the current Internet is facing serious problems and approaching a turning point. To achieve diversity and harmony with human society, more adaptive and flexible sharing schemes of network resource are required. Especially when a number of large-scale distributed applications share the resource, efficacy on comprehensive usage of network, computation, and storage resources is needed from the viewpoint of information processing as a whole. Therefore, reconsideration of coordination and partitioning of functions between networks (providers) and applications (users) become a recent research topic. In this paper, we discuss the feasibility and issues of flexible and adaptive network services by introducing advanced relay nodes inside the network. Furthermore, we present implementation design of advanced relay nodes, and show experimental results using these nodes.