Autonomous services need a flexible router platform that provides the mechanisms to install, modify and remove services at run-time of the node without interfering with others. Instantiated services must have the ability to re-configure themselves and to exchange service functionality on demand. Envisioned router platforms must be able to run multiple services in parallel and are required to scale with the number of network-interfaces while they need to provide a straightforward to use service programming interface. In this paper, we present the PromethOS NP router platform together with a service architecture to counteract distributed denial of service attacks in an autonomous, policy-based way. PromethOS NP manages and controls a processorhierarchy composed of host processors and network processors embedded in network interface cards. It provides a dynamically code-extensible router platform of which all processor tiers are at run-time programmable following a unified component programming model. The service architecture illustrates the capabilities of the router platform and its applicability to autonomous network services.
['Lukas Ruf', 'Arno Wagner', 'Károly Farkas', 'Bernhard Plattner']
A flexible router platform for next generation network services