Realization of a secure active and programmable network infrastructure via mobile agent technology

The deployment of sophisticated telecommunication services poses demanding design and implementation challenges to the underlying infrastructure. The end-goal of more flexibility, fault tolerance, quality of services, intelligence, component-based service integration, service personalization, programmability, openness and of course security in a heterogeneous infrastructure can be reasonably achieved via active and programmable networks. In this paper, we first investigate an integrated architecture for active and programmable network infrastructures that is based on mobile agent technology. Subsequently we present a security architecture for our node and comment on its functionality and technology choices made. At the end a dynamic VPN deployment with nomadic user support scenario is analyzed in order to argue about the pros and cons offered by this approach.