Reflections on Network Architecture: an Active Networking Perspective

After a long period when networking research seemed to be fo-cused mainly on making the existing Internet work better, inter-est in “clean slate ” approaches to network architecture seems to be growing. Beginning with the DARPA program in the mid-1990’s, researchers working on active networks explored such an approach, based on the idea of a programming interface as the basic interoper-ability mechanism of the network. This note draws on the author’s experiences in that effort and attempts to extract some observations or “lessons learned ” that may be relevant to more general network architecture research