A programmable router architecture supporting control plane extensibility

The Internet is evolving from an infrastructure that provides basic communication services into a more sophisticated infrastructure that supports a wide range of electronic services such as virtual reality games and rich multimedia retrieval services. However, this evolution is happening only slowly, in part because the communication infrastructure is too rigid. In this article we present a programmable router architecture in which the control plane functionality of the router can be extended dynamically through the use of delegates. Delegates can control the behavior of the router through a well-defined control interface, allowing service providers and third-party software vendors to implement customized traffic control policies or protocols. We describe Darwin, a system that implements such an architecture. We emphasize the runtime environment the system provides for delegate execution and the programming interface the system exports to support delegates. We demonstrate the advantages of using this system with two delegate examples.