Forwarding plane flooding

Flooding is a fundamental operation used extensively in communication protocols. Flooding introduces two types of overhead: (a) additional network traffic from the flooded packets, and (b) additional processing at the control processor of a network node that has to receive all the flooded packets, perform duplicate detection and process them. In contrast to packet forwarding resources, control processor resources are usually limited resulting flooding having a major impact on the load of the control processor. In this work we will investigate if is possible to take advantage of the higher performance forwarding plane of a network node to implement flooding and duplicate flooded packet detection. This will allow us to significantly reduce some of the cost associated with flooding. We will show how flooding can be implemented in the multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) forwarding plane and we will discuss potential uses of forwarding plane flooding in traffic engineering and virtual private network applications.