Active networks: mobile agents as an enabling technology

Active networks are a novel approach to network architecture that allows user-driven computation to be dynamically introduced within networks. Active networks not only allow a massive increase in service customization capabilities, they also introduce an added complexity for service deployment and management. In this article, the authors propose the use of mobile agents, and present their benefits, as an enabling technology for active networks. A framework for building an agent-based architecture of active networks is also proposed. The authors present different aspects of the framework such as customization encapsulation within agents, customization transfer through mobile agents, and safe customization execution.