The active process interaction with its environment

Adding programmability to the interior of the network provides an infrastru cture for distributed applications. Specifically, network management (NM) a nd control applications require access to and control of network device sta te. For example, a routing load balancing application may require access to the routing table, and a congestion avoidance application may require inte rface congestion information. There are fundamental problems associated wit h this interaction that are apparent in current technologies. In this paper , the basic tradeoffs associated with the interaction between an active pro cess and its environment and presenting ABLE++ as an example architecture i s studied. Most notably, two design tradeoffs, efficient vs. abstraction an d application flexibility vs. security are explored. The advantages of the architecture by implementing a congestion avoidance algorithm are demonstra ted. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.