The active process interaction with its environment

Adding programmability to the interior of the network provides an infrastructure for distributed applications. Specifically, network management (NM) and control applications require access to and control of network device state. For example, a routing load balancing application may require access to the routing table, and a congestion avoidance application may require interface congestion information. There are fundamental problems associated with this interaction that are apparent in current technologies. In this paper, the basic tradeoffs associated with the interaction between an active process and its environment and presenting ABLE++ as an example architecture is studied. Most notably, two design tradeoffs, efficient vs. abstraction and application flexibility vs. security are explored. The advantages of the architecture by implementing a congestion avoidance algorithm are demonstrated. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.