  Major benefits of wireless sensor nodes of IoT like low cost and easy
deployment are advocating their usage in variety of applications. Some of them
are health monitoring, agriculture, environmental and habitant monitoring, and
water monitoring. These nodes are autonomous in nature. It follows that they
like to operate in a dynamic and adaptive network environment. So, the
communication mechanism between IoT nodes must be robust and adaptive with
respect to the environmental change. Unfortunately, the traditional networking
architecture supports limited and fixed network computations. These limitations
inhibit flexible and robust IoT nodes communication. In addition, the energy
consumption in communication nodes is high due to limited processing. To
address these issues, this paper gives rebirth to the active system. The
proposed active network framework brings a novel integration of the active
system with recent technologies (software-defined networking and network
function virtualization). As a result of integration, the active system runs as
a network function virtualization under the control of software-defined
networking. In our view, the amalgam of recent technologies with the active
system will promote a robust and flexible IoT nodes communication along with
reduced energy consumption. Moreover, various design benefits such as security,
flexibility, usability, cost, and performance will be added to the system.
Additionally, the proposed framework is open and generalized. It can be
extended to other networks such as mobile, satellite, and vehicular networks.
