Control and Forwarding Plane Interaction in Distributed Routers

The requirements on IP routers continue to increase, both from the control plane and the forwarding plane perspectives. To improve scalability, flexibility, and availability new ways to build future routers need to be investigated. This paper suggests a decentralized, modular system design for routers, based on control elements for functionalities like routing, and forwarding elements for packet processing. Further, we present measurements on the distribution of large routing tables in an experimental platform consisting of one control element and up to 16 forwarding elements.

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