Active routing

Active routing permits individual customers, network managers, or network owners to control the paths that their data takes through the network. The objective is to allow routing mechanisms that provide quality of service (QoS), mobility, etc., to be quickly deployed, without waiting for standards, and to allow different routing mechanisms, that provide similar services, to compete. The current work on label switching (MPLS) can also be used to give high level customers, such as virtual private networks (VPNs), more control over their paths. We show how active routing can extend the capabilities of MPLS. We address several implementation issues, including pricing and distributed sandboxes. Pricing or policing must be used to limit the resources that customers acquire, in order to encourage them to use network resources economically. Sandboxes must be used to limit the resources that the participants acquire, in order to limit the harm that they can inflict on other participants. Active routing creates a free market system where network providers compete to sell their resources and implementers compete to sell their active routing programs. We establish a framework to quantitatively compare networks and service providers. As an example, we route Internet protocol (IP) telephony over combinations of circuit and packet networks.