New network technologies are often restricted by the limitations of todayUs network devices. This lack of flexibility and extensibility hinders or delays the evolution and deployment of new mechanisms. We believe that active networks have the potential to overcome these limitations by replacing current network devices with programmable nodes.
This work-in-progress report introduces a novel component-based active router architecture designed to provide support for emerging network technologies, and demonstrates the flexibility and extensibility of this architecture by addressing some of the most pressing handoff problems present in next generation IP based mobile multimedia systems.