| With the rapid development of new network applications, more and more protocols and services are required to be deployed in network elements. However service extensibility of traditional network elements is very inefficient. More recently, programmable network elements have come into being, which improves the programmability of network elements and enables automatic deployment of network protocols and services.There are many research on programmable networks, including research on active networks, such as ANTS,and research on OpenSig, such as research in IETF ForCES group. Active networks can provide flexible service extension for network elements, while OpenSig can provide service control, esp. QoS control, with the definition of interfaces. However the Next Generation Network requires an open programmable network platform, which should not only provide QoS control, but also flexible service extensibility.ForCES is a newly proposed open programmable interface standard of IP network elements, and it defines QoS control interface in IP network elements. The author has done research on ForCES standard and FACT protocol for ForCES interface. A prototype of FACT protocol is designed and implemented by the author. The author proposes an extension to the protocol, which makes the protocol able to support active service provision/extension. The article presents a description of the new protocol and presents a new service provision/extension scheme based on the new protocol. At last the article gives an analysis of the new scheme based on petri-net model and queuing theory model. A comparison between the new scheme and traditional schemes is given based on the model. The research and implementation of ForCES protocol and the related standards provide a base platform for future research on open programmable interface. The new protocol and active service provision scheme provide flexible service extensibility and have good performance in system utility and service provision time delay.
|
PDF Full Text Request