Design and Implementation of Control-Extensible Router

Abstract

The rapid development of Internet requires that control and forwarding plane of traditional IP router should be uncoupled and implemented in standard protocol. At the same time performance scalability and easiness of new function deployment also burden traditional router. In this paper, we propose and implement a new control plane and forwarding plane architecture called Controlling Extensible Router (CER). CER separates the implementation of control plane functions from forwarding plane and hosted it at general purpose server. Forwarding functions of CER are based on network processor and control software is designed on the basis of modular objects. They permit fast creation, configuration and deployment of new services and protocols. Compared with traditional IP router architecture, CER could rapidly employ the new control protocol and enhance the performance of control plane and forwarding plane independently, especially for control plane with using common high computer server.