Analysis and design of protocol stacks at node of active network.

Active networks allow injecting customisation and variability of services into the nodes of the network. The principal advantages of basing the network architecture on the customised selection of protocols provide a means for implementation of fine grained application-specific functions and a powerful platform for user-driven customisation of the infrastructure. An active computer network node is modelled as a graph with subset of protocols as graph nodes and a pair of co-operating protocols as graph links. The separate subsets of protocols contain protocols with similar scope of functionality and different value of parameters describing quantity of delivered services. Processing times and increasing rates associated with every pair of protocols are utilised to formulate performance criteria describing quality of ordered protocols set. The proposed performance measure, composed of processing time and route length, is then applied to formulate a protocols stock analysis and design tasks. The tasks are equivalent to formulation of various topology, capacity and flow assignment problems.