Graham P. Phillips, University of Southern California

Graham P. Phillips

Mailing Address:
c/o Graham Phillips
CPlane, Inc.
897 Kifer Rd
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
USA

Electronic Mail: graham@cplane.com

Phone/fax: (w) (+1)(408) 7894081 (h) (+1)(408) 7309410

I am working at CPlane in Sunnyvale, California. Previously, I studied at USC (USC/Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and Computer Networks and Distributed Systems Research Laboratory), Universiteit van Stellenbosch and the University of Cape Town. Before that, I went to school at Rondebosch Boys' High School.

I'm a big fan of the open-source paradigm, which I believe to be an important revival in the software industry. We seem to be emerging from the Software Dark Ages initiated by software companies such as Microsoft who sought to reduce freedom of choice from users. If you would like to find out more on open-source, please see http://www.opensource.org. Feel the force, read the source!

Active Reservation Protocol (ARP)

This project is part of a DARPA initiative to study active-networking. The term active-networking refers to packets that are active in the sense that they contain code, rather than passive data. The code is then executed at each hop in the network. One of the disadvantages with this approach is that the execution of code will increase the latency for packets to traverse the network. However, the ARP project is investigating the use of active networking for latency-insensitive applications, for example, setup protocols like RSVP. For a plethora of infomation on RSVP, see http://www.isi.edu/div7/rsvp.

We are using Java byte-code as the language for active packets. In this regard, we have re-implemented our RSVP code in Java and we have also designed an execution environment (written in Java wherever possible and C otherwise). The main function of the execution environment is to accept packets, to load any code that is not available locally and to execute the code contained therein. The execution also provides a programming interface to active code, much like the JDK provides an interface to Java applications. The difference is that our interface contains extra functions that are particular to networking applications. For more information see http://www.isi.edu/active-signal/ARP/.

Together with SRI, ISI is putting together an active-network, called the ABONE. For more information take a look at http://www.isi.edu/abone/.

New to Unix?

Try these resources:

http://www.ucs.ed.ac.uk/~unixhelp/servers.html for Unix commands.

http://www.freebsd.com for FreeBSD documentation and source code.

http://www.slashdot.org and http://www.linux.com for opensource and Linux news.