Naoki Wakamiya

Scott Nettles

Ian W. Marshall

This volume of the LNCS series contains the papers accepted for presentation at the Third IFIP international working conference on active networks (IWAN 2001). The workshop was held at the Sheraton University City Hotel, in Philadelphia USA, and was hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. Active networks aim to ease the introduction of network services by adding dynamic programmability to network devices such as routers, and making aspects of the programmability accessible to users. Active networks research has focused on the development and testing of active techniques, that enable dynamic programmability in a networked environment. These techniques have a wide variety of applications. At IWAN 2001 we aimed to bring together members of the various communities using active and related techniques, and provide a forum for discussion and collaboration, involving researchers, developers, and potential users. Papers presented at IWAN 2001 covered the application of active techniques to many aspects of network based communication, including active multicast, active QoS, active security, active GRIDs, and active management. In addition, there were papers on architectures, language, and API issues. Although there were only 22 submissions, the standard of the 10 accepted papers was very high. This indicated clearly a substantial amount of ongoing high quality research in active networking, despite the current unfavorable economic conditions in the telecommunications industry. The papers also demonstrated that the research is genuinely global, and justifies an international workshop of this type. We would like to thank all the authors who submitted their work.

IFIP-TC6 Third International Working Conference, IWAN 2001, Philadelphia, PA, USA, September 30-October 2, 2001. Proceedings

Active Networks

Auke Jan Ijspeert

Masayuki Murata

The evolution of the Internet has led us to the new era of the information infrastructure. As the information systems operating on the Internet are getting larger and more complicated, it is clear that the traditional approaches based on centralized mechanisms are no longer meaningful. One typical example can be found in the recent growing interest in a P2P (peer-to-peer) computing paradigm. It is quite different from the Web-based client-server systems, which adopt essentially centralized management mechanisms. The P2P computing environment has the potential to overcome bottlenecks in Web computing paradigm, but it introduces another difficulty, a scalability problem in terms of information found, if we use a brute-force flooding mechanism. As such, conventional information systems have been designed in a centralized fashion. As the Internet is deployed on a world scale, however, the information systems have been growing, and it becomes more and more difficult to ensure fau- free operation. This has long been a fundamental research topic in the field. A complex information system is becoming more than we can manage. For these reasons, there has recently been a significant increase in interest in biologically inspired approaches to designing future information systems that can be managed efficiently and correctly.

Naoki Wakamiya

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