A control and management plane for large packet switches

In this paper we address the problem of designing a control and management plane for large packet switches. In particular, we consider the case where the forwarding plane is distributed among several line cards interconnected through a passive optical fabric. The main contribution of the paper is the discussion of issues arising when designing a unique and consistent control and management plane, and the proposal of a solution for the considered architecture. Finally, we consider the case of building an Ethernet switch, discuss implementation details and describe the experimental setup used to validate the proposed approach.