Active network and policy based management

Active networks offer new prospects for the design and the deployment of new services, by opening the network equipment to the end user. Such abilities pose serious security problems: defective, faulty components or components installed by malicious users can seriously damage or monopolize an active node´s resources. For industrial acceptance of this type of network architecture, the design of and experimentation with an active management architecture are mandatory. We know that a node operating system (NodeOS) and one or more execution environments run within each active node. The NodeOS is responsible for the allocation and the scheduling of the node resources, which is a challenge in itself. We study the integration of active nodes in the Internet of the future. Our goal is to manage the active nodes by monitoring and controlling the supported services and the resource access to improve QoS. In order to carry that out, we propose new mechanisms of resources access management in the active node, based on the concept of policies.