Adopting software engineering practices to network processor devices introducing the Domain Specific Modeling paradigm to the ForCES Framework

IETF's new Forwarding and Control Element Separation (ForCES) architecture specifies the ForCES model providing an accurate description of the Forwarding Plane in an Object-Oriented fashion. However, the model is described totally in an XML Schema Definition (XSD): it is well-defined but purely machine oriented, being readable and usable, thus not human-friendly and difficult extending itself in the future. We argue that the ForCES model is actually a meta-model that is used to model ForCES components, e.g. Logical Function Blocks (LFBs), that later are used in ForCES applications. This paper presents a methodology based on a case study on how to automate the process of configuring the forwarding plane of network devices using state-of-the-art model-driven techniques in a tangible way while specifying a tool supported by a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for ForCES. We first consider describing the ForCES XSD based meta-model to a more manageable Ecore (MOF) based meta-model and then we create a DSL based on this Ecore meta-model. Then we target to transform automatically a Platform Independent ForCES model specified in the DSL to an executable target source code (Platform Specific: XML-ForCES compliant, C++, Java) able to communicate with the ForCES protocol.