Small packets constitute a large fraction of packets in the Internet. Gathercast is a network layer service that combines small packets going to the same destination into a bigger packet. Gathercast reduces the number of packets in the network and also saves computations at routers. Due to its dynamic and programmable property, active network is ideally suited to support gathercast. In this paper, we rst discuss some pervious work on gathercast. Then we propose a new model with low overhead for active gathercast. With this model, applications obtain bene ts from gathercast without knowing its existence. Finally we present an implementation of the active gathercast on top of ASP and NETIOD.
Yu He, Cauligi S. Raghavendra, Steven Berson