Summary of changes

This is a summary of the changes on which the following sections will elaborate.

• Separation of ANTS run-time system and Node OS services. We have started to separate the actual ANTS run-time system from underlying services that will be provided by a Node OS. This separation was made explicit by putting the services in a different package. This should allow for different implementations. At this time, the node services include a simple dispatch framework for incoming packets and a node OS buffer type.
• Introduction of a dispatch framework for incoming packets. We implemented a dispatch framework in Java that allows early packet demultiplexing. Our framework may be extended by active protocols.
• Providing separate name spaces and threads for each protocol. While ANTS 1.2 used one global name space for all remotely loaded protocols, we now run each protocol in its own name space. ANTS 1.2 used one thread per channel; we now use one thread per protocol, opening the possibility of per-protocol resource control.
• Additions, updates, and fixes. We added a simple remote console that allows one to connect to a running router to obtain and set status information. We updated the code base to JDK 1.1 and fixed a number of minor things. These changes are detailed in the Appendix.

ANTS' author, Dave Wetherall of MIT, has reacted positively to a general outline of our changes and intends to incorporate them into the main distribution when his time allows. Our ANTS snapshot is available from http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flux/janos/.