Introduction

Anetd is an experimental daemon specifically designed to support the deployment, operation and control of active networks [3]. The Anetd design philosophy is to be fully backward compatible with current networking software, and at the same time to introduce new innovative functionality in managing, designing and controlling active networks. Anetd doesn't need superuser privileges to run and has minimal installation requirements.

Today, Anetd can be be used to manage legacy networking software and more experimental software derived from active networking research. Anetd performs two major functions:

1. Deployement. It allows the deployment, configuration and control of networking software, including current active networking execution environment (EE) prototypes, into the network.
2. Demultiplexing. It demultiplexes active network packets, encapsulated using ANEP [1], to multiple EEs located on the same network node and sharing the same input port.

Anetd requires little or no change to either legacy networking software or current active networking prototypes and greatly improves the ability to manage large active networks.