Applications can invoke a channel with programmable protocol components of the fly. The actual transport codes can be provided securely by third party network middleware developers. It provides another framework for active networking suitable for composing interaction construct ..

Made-to-Order (MTO) Channel

This is another framework developed at medianet lab for building programmable networks. This conceptualizes a novel generalization of the classical socket construct.

 

In this approach programmability is infused into network in the form of custom soft composable sockets called made-to-order channels (MTO channel). Various transport features can be built into this socket for fulfilling the varying but specific needs of the applications.

 

When an application selects an MTO-channel- the operating system kernel simply does not bind this socket to an existing protocol stack (such as a conventional TCP, UDP, IP, IPv6 etc.). Rather a channel constructor (kernel process) is activated in the background which can auto-deploy a stack of protocol components (from a secured remote code base) in the pathway nodes using active networking technology.

 

It essentially on-the-fly composes a network transport service- before returning the socket handler to the application.

 

>>NET: Javed I. Khan and Seung. S. Yang, Made-to-Order Channels: A Framework for Building Complex Netcentric Systems on Active Network, IEEE Proceedings of the Active Networks Conference and Exposition DANCE 2002, San Jose, CA May 21-24, 2002, pp.409-426. [KhYa02]

 

>>NET: Javed I. Khan, A Polymorphic Formalism for Made-to-Order Custom Channel Building for Large Scale Netcentric Systems, Workshop on New Visions for Large-Scale networks: Research and Applications, Federal Large Scale Networking Working Group, DARPA, DOE, NASA, NIST, NLM, and NSF, Vienna, VA, March 12-14, 2001 (also selected as panel presentation). ). [PDF]

 

>>NET: Javed I. Khan & S. S. Yang, Resource Adaptive Nomadic Transcoding on Active Network, International Conference of Applied Informatics, AI 2001, February 19-22, 2001, Insbruck, Austria, ISBN:0-88986-280-X (307), pp262-267. [PDF]

 

>>NET: Javed I. Khan & S. S. Yang, Made-to-order Custom Channel for Netcentric Applications over Active Network, Proc. of International Conference on Internet and Multimedia Systems and Applications, IMSA 2000, November 20-23, 2000 Las Vegas, USA,pp-22-26. [PDF]

Selected Publications

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Besides expanding the choice and programmability in transport services, the MTO-channel formalism also makes available two powerful application/network protocol interaction features; applications can poll various status variables associated with the channel operation and they can also subscribe to various channel events (generated by protocol components) by attaching their own interrupt handlers.

 

The framework is grounded on the formalism of polymorphic reusable component based systems engineering.

 

We have developed the framework and tested several novel examples of made-to-order- channels such as daisy chain channel- a store-and-forward transport that can send data over pathways made of intermittent links, concurrent links, etc.

 

All this is done within the proven and popular network programming abstraction of network sockets.

 

MTO-channels offer a new degree of flexibility in building complex and smarter networked systems.

The work has been supported by DARPA.

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Page last updated February, 2008, Medianet Laboratories.

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