Modern layer 3 networking technologies have mainly been designed for performance and for network providers. This report proposes a new network architecture called Active Protocol Label Switching (APLS) that combines the performance of current label switching technology with novel concepts that cultivate service provisioning. Novel features such as Virtual Label Space, APLS micro-instruction architecture, and micro-policy based forwarding provide a more powerful network model, facilitate better network level service engineering, and give tremendous flexibility to both network and service providers. The thrust of our study is to construct an APLS test-bed using open hardware and software and later use this test-bed for experimenting various fea- tures/options available with APLS.This report also describes our pro- totype implementation of APLS under Linux.