Active Network Management

The Internet being so generally used is developing rapidly. With the users'demands increasing and new transmission tenologies occurring, the architecture of existing networks can't efficiently and flexibly support the users'applications that are becoming more complicated. The Active Networks (AN) technology was designed to solve these problems.The Active Network is a novel network architecture which is based on store-compute-and-forward transmission model. Active nodes not only can operate packets routing, but also can perform customized computation, which improves the tramission effeciecy and increases the flexibility and customizability of the network. In Active Networking, applications not only determine the protocol functions as necessary at the endpoints of a communication path, but also inject new protocols into the network for the network nodes to execute on their behalf.Basing on the perspectives of Active Networks, Active Network Management has many features that is hard to realized or cannot realized at all by tranditional networks.In this paper, the characters of Active Networks and Active Network Management are firstly analyzed. Active Networking affords an opportunity to take a new look at the network management problem and communications in general from a different perspective. For the Active Network model provides a user-driven customization of the infrastructure, allowing new services to be deployed at a faster pace than can be sustained through standardization.Then the functions of Active Network Management are designed basd on Active Network framework which is realized by Protocol Booster. The functions include active node topology dectecting in Active Network, interface IP configurating, and route table operating, and etc..At the end of the paper, Cognitive Network is discussed by comparing with Active Network Management, preparing for further research in Active Network Management.