Forwarding and Control Element Separation BOF (ForCES)
Tuesday, December 12, 2000, 1415-1515
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CHAIRS: Abel Weinrib <weinrib@intel.com>
John Dickey <jdickey@mmcnet.com>
MOTIVATION:
Recent trends in networking have created the need for standard
mechanisms that would allow third party network processors and
platform-independent control planes to interoperate. Some
examples of these trends include:
1. The recent emergence of ASICs and network processors that
represent commercial-off-the-shelf solutions to building
powerful, flexible wire-speed packet processing hardware.
2. The appearance of a new generation of third party signaling
stacks and control plane software implementations. These
represent off-the-shelf solutions to implementing control
plane functionality independent from the network processor
platform in such domains as IPv4 forwarding, provisioned,
and signaled QoS.
A logical network device made up of multiple pieces of next
generation packet-processing hardware separated from a platform-
independent control plane require a set of standard
communications protocols to achieve interoperability. These
standard protocols must function across the variety of mediums
(e.g., backplanes, circuits, IP networks) by which control and
forwarding planes are interconnected.
DESCRIPTION:
The goal of this effort is to identify a set of requirements, to
develop a framework, and to standardize one or more mechanisms
that support the separation in logical IP devices of the control
from one or more forwarding planes. The architecture that
supports IP control and forwarding separation should have the
following characteristics:
1. A single logical entity acts as the control plane and
provides slow-path functions, many of which are
computationally intensive such as signaling, routing, and
management. The operations of the control plane are
typically done over a relatively long time span and are
never done on a per-packet basis.
2. One or more forwarding entities exist that perform per-
packet forwarding and manipulations such as IP TTL
decrement, header checksum calculation, policing, shaping,
tagging, marking, and queuing. The forwarding entities
may also perform a limited amount of signal processing if
required in the fast path. For example, the forwarding
entities may support link layer protocols (e.g., ARP).
3. The control plane and the forwarding entities act in
concert, appearing to an outside observer as a single
logical network element even though it may be composed of
a control blade and several media blades.
It is not an initial goal of this effort to develop mechanisms
to control the label-switched portions of IP devices. We will
define requirements for how the IP and label-switched portions
of the devices interact and will then develop mechanisms to
support this interaction if needed.
AGENDA:
Agenda bashing co-chairs
Motivation Abel Weinrib - 5 min
The Multiservice Switching Forum Reference Architecture and its
Application to Control/Forwarding Separation
- David McDysan 10 min
Network Processors and Control/Forwarding Separation
- John Dickey 10 min
Internet-Draft presentations
Requirements for Separation of Control and Forwarding (draft-
anderson-forces-req-00.txt) Anderson et al. 10 min
Charter presentation (work description, objectives,
goals/milestones)
- David Putzolu 15 min
Working Group formation discussion 10 min
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