The explosive growth of the usage along with a greater diversification of communication technologies and applications imposes the Internet to manage further scalability and diversity, requiring more adaptive and flexible sharing schemes of network resources. Especially when a number of large-scale distributed applications concurrently share the resource, efficacy of comprehensive usage of network, computation, and storage resources is needed from the viewpoint of information processing performance. Therefore, a reconsideration of the coordination and partitioning of functions between networks (providers) and applications (users) has become a recent research topic. In this paper, we first address the need and discuss the feasibility of adaptive network services by introducing special processing nodes inside the network. Then, a design and an implementation of an advanced relay node platform are presented, by which we can easily prototype and test a variety of advanced in-network processing on Linux and off-the-shelf PCs. A key feature of the proposed platform is that integration between kernel and userland spaces enables to easily and quickly develop various advanced relay processing. Finally, on the top of the advanced relay node platform, we implement and test an adaptive packet compression scheme that we previously proposed. The experimental results show the feasibility of both the developed platform and the proposed adaptive packet compression.

Introducing adaptive online data compression at network-internal nodes is considered for alleviating traffic congestion on the network. In this paper, we assume that advanced relay nodes, which possess both a relay function (network resource) and a processing function (computational and storage resources), are placed inside the network, and we propose an adaptive online lossless packet compression scheme utilized at these nodes. This scheme selectively compresses a packet according to its waiting time in the queue during congestion. Through preliminary investigation using actual traffic datasets, we investigate the compression ratio and processing time of packet-by-packet compression in actual network environments. Then, by means of computer simulations, we show that the proposed scheme reduces the packet delay time and discard rate and investigate factors necessary in achieving efficient packet relay.

We propose an asynchronous variable-length optical packet switch that is based on a packet compression scheme and delay-line loop buffers, and evaluate the packet loss probability of the proposed switch through simulation and analysis. Simulation results well the analytical results and show the accuracy of our analysis. When the packet compression ratio is low, optical packet interval regulators are useful to improve the packet loss probability characteristics.