Forwarding and Control Element Separation BOF (ForCES) Tuesday, December 12, 2000, 1415-1515 ===================================== CHAIRS: Abel Weinrib John Dickey 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 MAILING LIST/WEB SITE: A mailing list is available, to subscribe send an email with an empty subject line and "subscribe forces " in the body of the message to listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com. A web site is available at http://www.sstanamera.com/~forces