Router node with control fabric and resource isolation therein

Abstract

A router node for a broadband Internet access carrier environment scales in the data forwarding plane and the routing control plane. The router node architecture ensures satisfactory isolation between routing instances and satisfactory isolation between data forwarding plane and routing control plane resources bound to each routing instance. The router node has a dedicated control fabric which is nonblocking. The control fabric is reserved for traffic involving at least one module in the routing control plane. The control fabric further provides resources, such as physical paths, stores and tokens, dedicated to particular pairs of modules on the control fabric. The control fabric supports a configurable number of routing modules. The router node may be arranged in a multi-router configuration in which the control fabric has at least two routing modules.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.