With the explosion in the use of the Internet, the network's control and routing infrastructure is facing limitations in terms of increasing scale. The Internet is now mission-critical to many industries and providing high availability and fast path restoration is also a major concern. In the recent past, there have been several NANOG presentations on "millisecond IGP convergence" (http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0010/igp.html) and "subsecond ISIS convergence" (http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0202/cengiz.html) which discuss the importance of subsecond convergence of routing protocols deployed in the Internet today.

In large, high-speed networks, subsecond convergence of routing protocols could place a huge load and cause saturation of the Control Plane CPU in the router on which the routing protocols are running. This presentation talks about a novel approach to distribute the functionality of control protocols in switches and routers in order to provide scalability and robustness while achieving subsecond routing convergence. The proposed framework relieves the scalability bottlenecks in various signaling and routing protocols by selectively off-loading certain periodic operations of the protocols to the data plane processing components within a network element. We use OSPF as an example to demonstrate the framework. The explicit separation of control and forwarding planes using emerging standards, such as those being created by the IETF ForCES Working Group, can further facilitate the deployment of this framework.

More information on this architecture and its implementation is available at http://developer.intel.com/technology/itj/2003/volume07issue04/art05_control_plane/p01_abstract.htm.

About the Presenter
Hormuzd Khosravi is a Senior Network Software Engineer at Intel Labs. He has been involved in defining and developing standards and technology for modular networking and communications platforms at Intel. Hormuzd is active in the NPF (Network Processing Forum) and ForCES (Forwarding and Control Element Separation) Working Group at IETF, where he has authored a number of RFCs.