Distributed and disjoint forwarding and routing system and method
AssigneeAlcatel Lucent
InventorPrasad N. Golla
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A distributed and disjoint forwarding and routing system and method operable with a routing element having a scalable cluster-based architecture, wherein the control plane and data plane are loosely-coupled for effectuating non-disruptive switchover in the event of a failure. The routing element includes a partitionable data plane having one or more forwarding tables and a partitionable control plane having one or more routing tables operating under control of at least one routing protocol process. One or more update buffers are provided with respect to the forwarding and routing tables. A partitionable update agent module is disposed between the data and control planes for mediating the updating and coordination of the forward tables based on the routing tables.
Claims17
A router, comprising:
- a partitioned data plane including a plurality of forwarding tables, each forwarding table including forwarding information that effectuates a data forwarding process through said router;
- a partitioned control plane including a plurality of routing tables operating under control of at least one routing protocol process, said routing tables including information that effectuates routing decisions with respect to said data forwarding process;
- a partitioned update agent plane coupled to both said partitioned data plane and said partitioned control plane, said partitioned update agent plane comprising:
- a control plane update agent module that maintains at least one redundant set of routing table information in a plurality of control plane update buffers that are coupled to said plurality of routing tables, wherein said control plane update buffers are located on said control plane, and wherein said control plane update agent module synchronizes said routing tables to each other;
- and
- a data plane update agent module operably coupled to said control plane update agent module to coordinate said forwarding information with said routing table information in association with a plurality of data plane update buffers that are coupled to said forwarding tables, wherein said data plane update buffers are located on said data plane, and wherein said forwarding tables are maintained, updated, and redundantly engineered independently of failures on said routing tables.
A distributed network, comprising:
- a first network element that routes data;
- and
- a second network element coupled to said first network element, wherein said first network element and said second network element are each comprised of a router with decoupled control and data planes and a separate update agent plane further comprising a control plane update module that synchronizes a plurality of routing tables to each other on said control plane, whereby forwarding tables are maintained, updated, and redundantly engineered independently of failures on said routing tables,
- wherein said router comprises:
- a plurality of control plane nodes that effectuate routing process functionality based on control updates from peer elements in said distributed network, each control plane node including a routing information database with routing tables and a control plane update buffer;
- a plurality of data plane nodes that forward data based on said routing process functionality, each data plane node including a forwarding information database with forwarding tables and a data plane update buffer;
- and
- the separate update agent plane comprising a control plane update agent that synchronizes said routing tables on said control plane node and a data plane update agent that synchronizes said forwarding tables on said data plane node, wherein said data plane update agents and control plane update agents update said forward information databases and said routing information databases in an asynchronous manner.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.