Commercially available routers typically have a monolithic operating system that cannot be easily tailored and upgraded and
support new network protocols. PromethOS is a modular router architecture based on Linux 2.4 which can be dynamically extended
by plugin modules that are installed in the networking kernel. To install and configure plugins we present a novel signaling
protocol that establishes explicitly routed paths transiting selected nodes in a predefined order. Such paths can be non-simple,
where a given node is being visited more than once.
Keywords Active networking - extensible router architecture - explicit path routing - service deployment
PromethOS originates from Prometheus who was the wisest Titan according to the Greek mythology. His name means “forethought”
and he was able to foretell the future. The project was initially codenamed COBRA.