With detailed knowledge of traffic behavior and application-layer requirements, the network provider can optimize traffic control at an extremely fine granularity, without requiring any changes in existing applications or user equipment. This project attempts to apply active networking and mobile code techniques to the problem of distributed network management. We are developing a method to network managers to encode a management task into special packets and send these packets to a network node where the code in the packet will be executed. In contrast, network management today based on SNMP is performed in a static client-server manner. A network manager polls each network node to retrieve status data.
Network nodes are passive and their programming is static.
The new approach allows network managers to perform any management task as needed without the scalability difficulties of SNMP network management. MPLS is an approach to IP switching where ATM-like switching concepts are borrowed to make IP routers more scalable and faster. As a connection-oriented technique, MPLS is more susceptible to faults than traditional connectionless IP routing. However, MPLS includes a capability for fast rerouting that can restore traffic to alternate routes around a fault.