Using active networks to enable universal personal computing

Active networking is an emerging research area aimed at providing flexible and user definable services by employing switches and routers capable of ex ecuting user supplied programs and performing computations on user data in transit. This networking environment can be customized on a per user applic ation basis. As the use of network computing applications becomes globally pervasive, users will demand new services which allow network access by nom adic users not only using their own portable computers, but using also any locally available networked computers or workstations, while providing each user with a personalized computing environment regardless of access locati on or computing equipment. This form of service, called universal personal computing, is also an emerging research area. In this paper, we review the capabilities of active networks as proposed in recent papers, and discuss t he issues of implementing universal personal computing. By examining how th ese issues are addressed by active networks, we propose that active network s present an excellent platform for realizing universal personal computing service.